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Palgrave Macmillan

The Poetry of Dante's Paradiso

Lives Almost Divine, Spirits that Matter

  • Book
  • © 2021

Overview

Authors:
  1. Jeremy Tambling

    1. London, UK

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  • A full-scale reading of Dante’s Paradiso that incorporates contemporary and historical Dante scholarship and modern critical theory

  • Reads the text as ‘modern’, and balances both Dante’s theology and present-day secularity

  • Draws on modern theoretical work on allegory, psychoanalysis, gender, and deconstruction

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xi
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction: Reading Paradiso Out of Time

    • Jeremy Tambling
    Pages 1-28

  3. Within the Shadow of the Earth

    • Jeremy Tambling
    Pages 29-89

  4. Dancing in the Sun: Paradiso—Cantos 10–14

    • Jeremy Tambling
    Pages 91-140

  5. Mars, Jupiter, Saturn: History and Its Reversals

    • Jeremy Tambling
    Pages 141-191

  6. Fixed Stars, Diasporic Times: Paradiso 22–27

    • Jeremy Tambling
    Pages 193-231

  7. Angels: Paradiso 28 and 29

    • Jeremy Tambling
    Pages 233-270

  8. The Ultimate Vision: Paradiso 30–33

    • Jeremy Tambling
    Pages 271-305

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 307-314
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Keywords

About this book

This book argues that Paradiso – Dante’s vision of Heaven – is not simply affirmative. It posits that Paradiso compensates for disappointment rather than fulfils hopes, and where it moves into joy and vision, this also rationalises the experience of exile and the failure of all Dante’s political hopes. The book highlights and addresses a fundamental problem in reading Dante: the assumption that he writes as a Catholic Christian, which can be off-putting and induces an overly theological and partisan reading in some commentary. Accordingly, the study argues that Dante must be read now in a post-Christian modernity. It discusses Dante's Christianity fully, and takes its details as a source of wonder and beauty which need communicating to a modern reader. Yet, the study also argues that we must read for the alterity of Dante’s world from ours. 



Reviews

“If one is looking for an understanding of Dante’s cosmos informed in equal parts by Walter Benjamin, George Herbert, and Ptolemy, it is to be found in Tambling’s book. … his book undeniably shows that ideas explored in Paradiso continue to matter beyond Dante’s own immediate context.” (Aistė Kiltinavičiūtė, Modern Language Review, Vol. 117 (3), July, 2022) “Professor Tambling adds an original voice to the current surge of interest in what

makes Dante’s Paradiso uniquely intriguing, even in comparison to the Inferno

and Purgatorio. He directly engages the question that haunts the poem: can

authentic human hope sustain itself on its spacewalk through the material

universe, even if it cannot foresee its end?”

—Francis J. Ambrosio, Georgetown University, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  • London, UK

    Jeremy Tambling

About the author

Jeremy Tambling is Professor of English at SWPS Warsaw (University of Social Sciences and Humanities), Poland. Prior to this, he was Professor of Literature at Manchester University, UK, and Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. He has written widely on Dante, psychoanalysis, urban literary studies, and Victorian literature. Previous publications on Dante include Dante and Difference: Writing in the Commedia (1988), Dante: A Critical Reader (ed.1999), and Dante in Purgatory: States of Affect (2012).


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