Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century Dante Beyond Influence

Unearthing previously unseen manuscript and print evidence, the book redefines the notion of Dante’s reception by conducting the first material and book-historical inquiry into the formation and popularisation of the the critical and scholarly discourse on Dante in Victorian culture. Dante beyond influence provides the first systematic inquiry into the formation of the British critical and scholarly discourse on Dante in the late nineteenth century (1865–1921). Overcoming the primacy of literary influence and intertextuality, it instead historicises and conceptualises the hermeneutic turn in British reception history as the product of major transformations in Victorian intellectual, social and publishing history. The volume unpacks the phenomenology of Victorian dantismo through the analysis of five case studies and the material examination of a newly discovered body of manuscript and print sources. Extending over a sixty-year-long period, the book retraces the sophistication of the Victorian modes of readerly and writerly engagement with Dantean textuality. It charts its outward expression as a public criticism circulating in prominent nineteenth-century periodicals and elucidates its wider popularisation (and commodification) through Victorian mass publishing. It ultimately brings forth the mechanism that led to the specialisation of the scholarly discourse and the academisation of Dante studies in traditional and extramural universities. Drawing on the new disciplines of book history and history of reading, the author provides unprecedented insight into the private intellectual life and public work of Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold and William E. Gladstone and introduces a significant cohort of Dante critics, scholars and learned societies hitherto passed unnoticed. As it recaptures a long-neglected moment in Dante’s reception history, this path-breaking book illuminates the wider socio-cultural and economic impact that the Victorian hermeneutic turn had in advancing women’s access to literary and scholarly professions, educational reform and discipline formation. Dante beyond influence is the first study to conceptualise and historicise the hermeneutic turn in Dante reception history and Victorian cultural history, charting its development across intellectual realms, agents and forms of readerly and writerly engagement. Unearthing previously unseen manuscript and print evidence, the book conducts a material and book-historical inquiry into the formation and popularisation of the critical and scholarly discourse on Dante through Victorian periodicals, mass-publishing, traditional and Extramural higher education. The book demonstrates that the transformation of Dante from object of amateur interest ( dantophilia) to subject of systematic interpretive endeavours ( dantismo) reflected paradigmatic changes in Victorian intellectual and socio-cultural history.