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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 851.1
EAN: 9781590172193
ISBN: 1590172191
Label: NYRB Classics
Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 208
Publication Date: 2007-01-16
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Product Release Date: 2007-01-16
Studio: NYRB Classics

Erich Auerbach’s Dante: Poet of the Secular World is an inspiring introduction to one of world’s greatest poets as well as a brilliantly argued and still provocative essay in the history of ideas. Here Auerbach, thought by many to be the greatest of twentieth-century scholar-critics, makes the seemingly paradoxical claim that it is in the poetry of Dante, supreme among religious poets, and above all in the stanzas of his Divine Comedy, that the secular world of the modern novel first took imaginative form. Auerbach’s study of Dante, a precursor and necessary complement to Mimesis, his magisterial overview of realism in Western literature, illuminates both the overall structure and the individual detail of Dante’s work, showing it to be an extraordinary synthesis of the sensuous and the conceptual, the particular and the universal, that redefined notions of human character and fate and opened the way into modernity.

CONTENTS
I. Historical Introduction; The Idea of Man in Literature
II. Dante's Early Poetry
III. The Subject of the "Comedy"
IV. The Structure of the "Comedy"
V. The Presentation
VI. The Survival and Transformation of Dante's Vision of Reality
Notes
Index

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: a way
Review: Auerbach's Dante book was published first in 1929 before the period of his Turkish teaching as Michael Dirda's helpful preface relates. In this book one can see Auerbach working out his thoughts both on mimesis, which would bear fruit in his most celebrated work, and on typology or that would become the focus of a stellar essay. What is most dazzling about this work here is its simultaneous attention to historical sweep and poetic detail. One works one's way from Homer, Greek tragedy and comedy, Aristotle and Virgil through Augustine, Guizinelli and Cavalcanti. By the time Dante's early works appear for discussion, the reader has amassed a tremendous background. Auerbach's writing on the Comedy is as impressive where he shows the ability to ponder the value of white petals on a rose or the necessity of the Veltro, or greyhound as the foe to the She-wolf that menaces Dante. Also, I was struck by Auerbach's attention to Dante's word order and period construction. After all that, it is remarkable to discover how sparsely emulated and admired Dante's poetry was for centuries after its completion. This little book fits scintillating learning within its 180 pages. I do recommend it.

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