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Reviewed by:
  • Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Aida Audeh and Nick Havely
  • Lorenzo Valterza (bio)
Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century. Edited by Aida Audeh and Nick Havely. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xiv + 400 pp. Cloth $120.00.

As its title suggests, Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century focuses on questions surrounding the creation of national identity primarily in Europe, while also engaging extensively with North America, India, and Turkey. Editors Aida Audeh and Nick Havely summarize the volume’s focus nicely when they write that the contributors have tried “to give close attention to the malleability of the Dante-myths within economies of meaning that may relate to national identities during the ‘long nineteenth century’” (2). In this, the collection succeeds admirably; its four principle sections (“Risorgimento: Italian National Identity,” “National Interests and Appropriations,” “Emerging Powers,” and “Recovering/Redefining Identities”) address topics as various as Marxist appropriations of Dante; issues related to gender and the human body; race and identity; colonialism; Dante’s literary and political influence on postcolonial revolutionaries; and his role in English efforts to create a national literature.

In section 1 Joseph Luzzi explores Ugo Foscolo’s turn from Petrarch to Dante in his attempts to forge a new Italian national identity. Luzzi argues that, while Petrarch offered poets an imitable model, Foscolo instead recognized in Dante a political model that helped him articulate his sense of italianità. This move preceded a similar, though national one. Stefano Jossa examines Italy as a literary construction and takes up the related question of the divergent fates of Dante’s statuses as literary and political icon among Italian revolutionaries. Communists reimagined Dante as a patriotic fighter for freedom, stripping him of his Catholic identity and bestowing him instead with a secular political agenda. Antonella Braida maps Giosuè Carducci’s changing relationship with Dante as a means of tracing how the latter became so central to nineteenth-century attempts to create sense of nation. Beatrice Arduini examines the poet’s new place in nineteenth-century Italian education, in particular in light of the new (and enduring) editorial standards imposed by Michele Barbi. Graham Smith’s essay demonstrates how the veneration of physical landmarks—in this case the stone where Dante allegedly used to sit—contributed to the creation of a new Italian identity by providing its citizens a tactile connection with the poet himself. Michael Caesar and Nick Havely examine how the Dante performances by Gustavo Modena on the English stage contributed to the creation of the identity of the nineteenth-century Italian political exile. This initial collection of essays sets the stage for those that follow by offering a collection of [End Page 636] diverse themes, bound by a restricted geographical and political framework, in this case, Italy and England.

The second section, “National Interests and Appropriations,” carries the discourse beyond Italy and into a broader European context. Aida Audeh examines how Dante’s importance to French national identity changed, following the developing political needs of republic and monarchy alike. The former found in Dante an ideal for citizen as homme public, while the latter made of him a grande homme that better exemplified the ideals of Napoleonic rule. James W. Thomas looks at Dante’s reception in later Occitan literature, specifically in the figure of Antoine Fabre d’Olivet. Thomas argues that d’Olivet’s “Cant Rouyaû, al Prouz é Noble Roumiû de Provença,” despite its apparent status as a “minority nationalist” appropriation, is in fact a much more nuanced attempt by Fabre to find a place for his Occitan past in his status within the modern French state. Diego Saglia examines the idea of nation expressed by three female authors in England: Anna Seward, Felicia Heman, and Mary Shelley. Saglia presents a problematic Dante, one whose foreign status presented considerable difficulties for figures like Seward, as it threatened notions of a British national literature that she and her fellow poets strove to establish and protect. Indeed, for Seward, the important object was to mitigate Dante’s non-Englishness in order to insulate the national poetical tradition from foreign influence. Julia Straub studies appropriations of Beatrice for Victorian notions of gender and nation...

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