Abstract
This essay will attend to the treatment by nineteenth-century poets, painters and literary scholars, of what was then commonly considered a tragic topic: the story of Francesca da Rimini in Dante’s fifth canto of the Inferno. Although Dante’s whole poem is design-ated by him a Commedia (for its middle status, mixed style, and junior relation to the Aeneid rather than its happy ending), the Inferno contains many narratives of great men brought low, such as Count Ugolino watching his sons starve to death in front of his eyes, and Ulysses, whose thirst for knowledge foundered on the shores of Mount Purgatory.1 What is particularly tragic about such figures is that they are fixed, locked into the narratives that caused and enacted their fall, their highest point of reference, Fortune.2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Bibliography
Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions, Fathers of the Church series, 21 (Washington, DC: Washington Catholic University of America, 1953).
•Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions, ed. R. S. Pine Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971).
del Balzo, Carlo, Francesca da Rimini nell‘Arte e nella Critica (Naples: Stab. Tiuoeranhico Cav. A. Tocco, 1895).
Barlow, H. C.,‘Francesca da Rimini, Her Lament and Vmdication; with a Brief Notice of the Malatesti’, Studies from Dante (London: 1859).
Barolini, Teodolinda, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Divine Comedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
Barry, William, The New AntiAone: A Romance (London: Macmillan, 1887).
Boccaccio, Giovanni, Tutte le Opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. 6, ed. Giorgio Padoan (Milan: Mondadori, 1965).
Brough, Robert, Medea: or, The Best of Mothers with a Brute of a Husband (London: T. H. Lacy, 1856).
Cary, Henry, The Vision; or Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante Alighieri (London: Bell & Dalby, 1869).
Curtius, Ernst, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Williard R. Trask (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953).
Dante Alighieri, The Banquet (Il Convito) of Dante Alighieri, trans. Katharine Hilliard (London: Kegan Paul, 1889).
Deguy, Michel (ed.), Du Sublime (Paris: Belin, 1988).
Le Gallienne, Richard, English Poems (London: Elkin, Mathew & John Lane, 1892).
Gaskell, Elizabeth, The Works of Mrs Gaskell, 8 vols, ed. A. W. Ward (London: John Murray, 1925).
Hatcher, Anna and Musa, Mark, ‘The Kiss: Inferno 5 and the Old French Lancelot’, Comparative Literature, 20 (1968), 97–109.
Hazlitt, William, Dramatic Essays, ed. William Archer and Robert W. Lowe (London: Walter Scott, 1895).
Jenkyns, Richard, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford: Blackwell,1980).
Kaplan, Fred, Dickens: A Biography (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1988).
Kirkpatrick, Robin, Dante’s Inferno: Difficulty and Dead Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, ‘On the Sublime’, trans. Geoff Bennington in ICA Documents: Postmodernism, ed. Lisa Appignanesi (London: Free Association,1989).
Lamb, Charles, ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation’, in Nineteenth-Century Critical Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1928).
Lanoff, Sue, Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers (New York: AMS, 1982).
Locella, Baron Gugliemo, Dantes Francesca da Rimini in der Literatur, Bildenden Kunst und Musik (Eszlingen: Paul Neff Verlag, 1913).
Longinus, On the Sublime, Loeb edn, trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe (London: Heinemann, 1927).
Lyotard, Frangois, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).
Mathew, A. H., Francesca da Rimini in Legend and History (London: David Nutt, 1908).
Noakes, Susan, ‘The Double Misreading of Paolo and Francesca’, Philological Quarterly, vol. 68 (1983), pp. 221–39.
Nussbauni, Martha, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Phillips, Stephen, Paolo and Francesca: A Tragedy in Four Acts (London: Bodley Head, 1889).
Poggioli, Renato ‘Paolo and Francesca’, in Dante: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. John Freccero (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965).
Popolizio, Stephen, ‘Literary Reminiscences and the Art of Reading in Inferno V’, Dante Studies, 98 (1980), pp. 19–33.
Roe, Albert, Blake‘s Illustrations to the Divine Comedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953).
Ruskin, John, Complete Works of John Ruskin, Library edition, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–12).
de Sanctis, Francesco, De Sanctis on Dante, trans. Joseph Rossi and Alfred Galpin (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, 1957).
Singleton, Charles S., Commentary to Paradiso, Bollingen Series (Princeton, NL• Princeton Univercity Press- 1975_
vSteiner, George, The Death v of Tragedy (London: Faber, 1961).
Tolstoy, Leo, Anna Karenina, trans. Lousie and Aylmer Maude, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1937).
Toynbee, Paget, Britain’s Tribute to Dante in Literature and Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1921).
—, Dante Studies and Researches (London: Methuen, 1902).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1998 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Milbank, A. (1998). Moral Luck in the Second Circle: Dante and the Victorian Fate of Tragedy . In: Havely, N. (eds) Dante’s Modern Afterlife. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26975-4_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26975-4_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-26977-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-26975-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)