Griffith and Dante

Enunciating authority: exonarrative inscriptions on or near miniatures of the Divine Comedy

Territorial Waters — Jurisdiction in — Over Foreign Merchant Vessels — Offences Committed by the User.Jurisdiction — Over Nationals in respect of Crimes Committed Abroad — Crime Committed on National Vessel In Foreign Territorial Waters — Italian Penal Code — Reference to International Law.

Jurisdiction — Over Nationals in respect of Crimes Committed Abroad — Crime Committed on Italian Vessel in Greek Waters — Italian Penal Code — Reference to International Law.

A wealth of prior research has examined the link between public service values and job satisfaction. This study, however, seeks to investigate this relationship through the lens of person-organization fit theory, specifically focusing on occupational satisfaction within the public sector. Moreover, it aims to reveal the mechanisms underlying the relationship between public service values and public-sector occupational satisfaction, employing the concept of public service motivation—a motivational framework unique to public administration. This study thus poses two central research questions: (1) Do public service values positively influence public-sector occupational satisfaction? and (2) Does public service motivation mediate the relationship between public service values and the satisfaction in the public sector? To address these questions, data from the 2023 Public Employee Survey by the Korea Institute of Public Administration were analyzed using structural equation modeling to test the proposed hypotheses. The findings confirmed that public service values have a statistically significant positive effect on public-sector occupational satisfaction. Furthermore, public service motivation was found to fully mediate the relationship between public service values and public-sector occupational satisfaction.

This study aims for exploring the relationship between public services value and organizational citizenship behavior and investigating the moderating effects of goal and job clarity on this relationship. On the basis of the person-organization and person-job fit theories, we examined the impact of public services value on organizational citizenship behavior and how goal and job clarity condition the relationship between public service value and organizational citizenship behavior, building on the contingency theory in the Korean government. To test our hypotheses, we analyzed data from the 2020 Public Employee Perception Survey administered by the Korea Institute of Public Administration, using the hierarchical linear regression method. The statistical results showed a positive association between public service value and organizational citizenship behavior. Further analysis revealed that goal and job clarity enhanced the positive relationship between public service value and organizational citizenship behavior. Accordingly, our findings imply that to facilitate organizational citizenship behavior in public sector organizations, public managers must implement human resource management practices to internalize public service value in public employees and make organizational goals and jobs clear.

This study investigates the relationships among strategic human resource management (SHRM), public service values, and innovative behavior, with a focus on MZ generation public employees, who comprise a growing majority in the public sector. Grounded in the motivation-attitude-behavior framework, the research integrates the theory of planned behavior and self-determination theory to examine how SHRM influences innovation. Using an integrated theoretical approach—drawing from social exchange theory, person-organization fit, and self-determination theory—this study analyzes data from 6,170 respondents from the Korea Institute of Public Administration’s 2022 Survey on Public Service Life. Findings indicate that SHRM sub-factors—competency enhancement, motivation, and opportunity enhancement—are positively associated with public service values and innovative behavior, with public service values showing the strongest association. Public service values mediate the effects of competency and opportunity enhancement on innovative behavior, and this mediation is moderated by MZ generation status. These results suggest that NPM-oriented SHRM strategies can align with Post-NPM public service values, underscoring the central role of public service values in fostering innovation in the public sector.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the use of Creativity by Dante Alighieri in modern popular culture. Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy" is actively exploited by modern mass culture. The reasons for the appeal of mass culture to this work are its saturation with vivid images, entertainment, saturation with archetypal images, which makes it possible for a wide audience to experience them. In the works of mass culture of a higher level, the appeal to "The Divine Comedy" attracts by the fact that it makes it possible to show the movement of the protagonist or civilization from suffering to happiness, from savagery and barbarism to harmony. Also from the works of Dante, the theme of hell and demonism is most actively borrowed. The idea of grotesque realism and (partly) feastful images make it possible to adequately interpret many works of modern mass culture. In the same way, it can be assumed that works devoted to the themes of hell, demonism and the otherworldly allows the consumer to go through a symbolic rebirth. Immersed in the world of fictional passions, frightened by eerie and grotesque images, the average resident of a globalized metropolis can return with renewed vigor to his ordinary life and daily duties.

Art Imitating ArtThis article discusses the global, historical and literary references that are present in the video game franchise Bayonetta. In particular, references to Dante’s Divine Comedy, the works of Dr John Dee, and European traditions of witchcraft are examined. Bayonetta is modern in the sense that she is a woman of the world. Her character shows how history and literature may be used, re-used, and evolve into new formats, and how modern games travel abroad through time and space.Drawing creative inspiration from other works is nothing new. Ideas and themes, art and literature are frequently borrowed and recast. Carmel Cedro cites Northrop Frye in the example of William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. These writers created stories and characters that have developed a level of acclaim and resonated with many individuals, resulting in countless homages over the years. The forms that these appropriations take vary widely. Media formats, such as film adaptations and even books, take the core characters or narrative from the original and re-work them into a different context. For example, the novel Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson published in 1883 was adapted into the 2002 Walt Disney animated film Treasure Planet. The film maintained the concepts of the original narrative and retained key characters but re-imaged them to fit the science fiction genre (Clements and Musker).The video-game franchise Bayonetta draws inspiration from distinct sources creating the foundation for the universe and some plot points to enhance the narrative. The main sources are Dante’s Divine Comedy, the projections of John Dee and his mystical practices as well as the medieval history of witches.The Vestibule: The Concept of BayonettaFigure 1: Bayonetta Concept ArtBayonetta ConceptsThe concept of Bayonetta was originally developed by video game designer Hideki Kamiya, known previously for his work including The Devil May Cry and the Resident Evil game series. The development of Bayonetta began with Kamiya requesting a character design that included three traits: a female lead, a modern witch, and four guns. This description laid the foundations for what was to become the hack and slash fantasy heroine that would come to be known as Bayonetta. "Abandon all hope ye who enter here"The Divine Comedy, written by Dante Alighieri during the 1300s, was a revolutionary piece of literature for its time, in that it was one of the first texts that formalised the vernacular Italian language by omitting the use of Latin, the academic language of the time. Dante’s work was also revolutionary in its innovative contemplations on religion, art and sciences, creating a literary collage of such depth that it would continue to inspire hundreds of years after its first publication.Figure 2: Domenico di Michelino’s fresco of Dante and his Divine Comedy, surrounded by depictions of scenes in the textBayonetta explores the themes of The Divine Comedy in a variety of ways, using them as an obvious backdrop, along with subtle homages and references scattered throughout the game. The world of Bayonetta is set in the Trinity of Realities, three realms that co-exist forming the universe: Inferno, Paradiso and the Chaos realm—realm of humans—and connected by Purgitorio—the intersection of the trinity. In the game, Bayonetta travels throughout these realms, primarily in the realm of Purgitorio, the area in which magical and divine entities may conduct their business. However, there are stages within the game where Bayonetta finds herself in Paradiso and the human realm. This is a significant factor relating to The Divine Comedy as these realms also form the areas explored by Dante in his epic poem. The depth of these parallels is not exclusive to factors in Dante’s masterpiece, as there are also references to other art and literature inspired by Dante’s legacy. For example, the character Rodin in Bayonetta runs a bar named “The Gates of Hell.” In 1917 French artist Auguste Rodin completed a sculpture, The Gates of Hell depicting scenes and characters from The Divine Comedy. Rodin’s bar in Bayonetta is manifested as a dark impressionist style of architecture, with an ominous atmosphere. In early concept art, the proprietor of the bar was to be named Mephisto (Kamiya) derived from “Mephistopheles”, another name for the devil in some mythologies. Figure 3: Auguste Rodin's Gate of Hell, 1917Aspects of Dante’s surroundings and the theological beliefs of his time can be found in Bayonetta, as well as in the 2013 anime film adaptation Bayonetta, Bloody Fate. The Christian virtues, revered during the European Middle Ages, manifest themselves as enemies and adversaries that Bayonetta must combat throughout the game. Notably, the names of the cardinal virtues serve as “boss ranked” foes. Enemies within a game, usually present at the end of a level and more difficult to defeat than regular enemies within “Audito Sphere” of the “Laguna Hierarchy” (high levels of the hierarchy within the game), are named in Italian; Fortitudo, Temperantia, Lustitia, and Sapientia. These are the virtues of Classical Greek Philosophy, and reflect Dante’s native language as well as the impact the philosophies of Ancient Greece had on his writings. The film adaption of Bayonetta incorporated many elements from the game. To adjust the game effectively, it was necessary to augment the plot in order to fit the format of this alternate media. As it was no longer carried by gameplay, the narrative became paramount. The diverse plot points of the new narrative allowed for novel possibilities for further developing the role of The Divine Comedy in Bayonetta. At the beginning of the movie, for example, Bayonetta enters as a nun, just as she does in the game, only here she is in church praying rather than in a graveyard conducting a funeral. During her prayer she recites “I am the way into the city of woe, abandon all hope, oh, ye who enter here,” which is a Canto of The Divine Comedy. John Dee and the AngelsDr John Dee (1527—1608), a learned man of Elizabethan England, was a celebrated philosopher, mathematician, scientist, historian, and teacher. In addition, he was a researcher of magic and occult arts, as were many of his contemporaries. These philosopher magicians were described as Magi and John Dee was the first English Magus (French). He was part of a school of study within the Renaissance intelligensia that was influenced by the then recently discovered works of the gnostic Hermes Trismegistus, thought to be of great antiquity. This was in an age when religion, philosophy and science were intertwined. Alchemy and chemistry were still one, and astronomers, such as Johannes Kepler and Tyco Brahe cast horoscopes. John Dee engaged in spiritual experiments that were based in his Christian faith but caused him to be viewed in some circles as dangerously heretical (French).Based on the texts of Hermes Trismegistas and other later Christian philosophical and theological writers such as Dionysius the Areopagite, Dee and his contemporaries believed in celestial hierarchies and levels of existence. These celestial hierarchies could be accessed by “real artificial magic,” or applied science, that included mathematics, and the cabala, or the mystical use of permutations of Hebrew texts, to access supercelestial powers (French). In his experiments in religious magic, Dee was influenced by the occult writings of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486—1535). In Agrippa’s book, De Occulta Philosophia, there are descriptions for seals, symbols and tables for summoning angels, to which Dee referred in his accounts of his own magic experiments (French). Following his studies, Dee constructed a table with a crystal placed on it. By use of suitable rituals prescribed by Agrippa and others, Dee believed he summoned angels within the crystal, who could be seen and conversed with. Dee did not see these visions himself, but conversed with the angels through a skryer, or medium, who saw and heard the celestial beings. Dee recorded his interviews in his “Spiritual Diaries” (French). Throughout Bayonetta there are numerous seals and devices that would appear to be inspired by the work of Dee or other Renaissance Magi.In these sessions, John Dee, through his skryer Edward Kelley, received instruction from several angels. The angels led him to believe he was to be a prophet in the style of the biblical Elijah or, more specifically like Enoch, whose prophesies were detailed in an ancient book that was not part of the Bible, but was considered by many scholars as divinely inspired. As a result, these experiments have been termed “Enochian conversations.” The prophesies received by Dee foretold apocalyptic events that were to occur soon and God’s plan for the world. The angels also instructed Dee in a system of magic to allow him to interpret the prophesies and participate in them as a form of judge. Importantly, Dee was also taught elements of the supposed angelic language, which came to be known as “Enochian” (Ouellette). Dee wrote extensively about his interviews with the angels and includes statements of their hierarchy (French, Ouellette). This is reflected in the “Laguna Hierarchy” of Bayonetta, sharing similarities in name and appearance of the angels Dee had described. Platinum Games creative director Jean-Pierre Kellams acted as writer and liaison, assisting the English adaptation of Bayonetta and was tasked by Hideki Kamiya to develop Bayonetta’s incantations and subsequently the language of the angels within the game (Kellams).The Hammer of WitchesOne of the earliest and most integral components of the Bayonetta franchise is the fact that the title character is a witch. Witches, sorcerers and other practitioners of magic have been part of folklore for centuries. Hideki Kamiya stated that the concept of” classical witches” was primarily a European legend. In order to emulate this European dimension, h

In recent public administration literature, much attention is paid to changes in public service values, including ethical values, that guide public service. This paper reports on the results of an empirical survey conducted among a group of Turkish governors and district governors (including those in service and retired) who are from different generations. By focusing on the transformation of value preferences of Turkish governors and district governors, this study tries to identify variations in values, particularly about public service ethics, in accordance with the age and the length of tenure in public service. The findings of the research show a traditional and more or less consistent value pattern for Turkish governors and district governors. The most important public service values expressed by the respondents are consistent with often-mentioned crucial public service values in the literature. New or emerging values have not been present enough among the most important public service values. In brief, the results do not lend support to the often-assumed hypothesis that traditional public service values are devaluated or degraded by the emergence of businesslike values. In other words, new emerging values could not sneak into the public service culture in any convincing manner in spite of many years of NPM rhetoric and recipes.

When NASPAA adopted new accreditation standards in 2009, it effectively placed public service values at the heart of the public administration curriculum. The efficacy of this approach is directly tied to the use that administrators make of public service values in the field. To explore whether and how public service values influence administrative behavior and decision making, this study used survey and qualitative interview data from a sample of 52 Midwestern state and local public administrators. Additionally, it used grounded theory methodology to develop a theoretical model that explains the link between public service values and the administrative behavior and decision making of practitioners. Data and conclusions drawn from the interviews, along with the results from a survey of administrative values, led us to conclude that administrators utilize a combination of ethical, professional, democratic, and human values to maintain legitimacy. In the public administrative context, legitimacy was understood by administrators to include personal credibility, professional competence, respect for democratic principles, and the ability to maintain positive relationships with citizens and colleagues. The article concludes with suggestions for further incorporation of public service values into the public administration curriculum.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewDeixis in the Early Modern English Lyric: Unsettling Spatial Anchors Like “Here,” “This,” “Come.” Heather Dubrow. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. viii+135.Marshall BrownMarshall BrownUniversity of Washington; Shanghai Jiaotong University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreNel mezzo del cammin di nostra vitaMi ritrovai per una selva oscuraChè la diritta via era smarrita.Ah quanto a dir qual era è cosa duraEsta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte,Che nel pensier rinnova la paura!Tant’ è amara che poco è più morte;Ma per trattar del ben ch’ io vi trovai,Dirò de l’ altre cose ch’ io v’ ho scorte.(Inferno 1.1–9)[Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray / from the straight road and woke to find myself /alone in a dark wood. How shall I say // what wood that was! I never saw so drear, / so rank, so arduous a wilderness! / Its very memory gives a shape to fear. // Death could scarce be more bitter than that place! / But since it came to good, I will recount /all that I found revealed there by God’s grace.]1The first line of Dante’s Divine Comedy invokes a commonplace, “the middle of the way of our life.” The second line turns to personal experience; literally, “I found myself again.” But did he find that he was lost, or did he regain his senses there? (Italian dictionaries give both negative and positive inflections of “ritrovarsi,” and the vague preposition “per,” which approximates “amid,” gives less help than would the more definite positioning of “in.”) How disjunct are the first two lines? Does Dante offer himself as Representative Man or as the bearer of special insight? The third line is an impersonal passive construction: “the straight way was lost.” Had Dante gone astray, or was there no path to follow? The missing conscious agent in this line marks the confusion. Then the emotion grabs hold. The dark wood takes over, with the intensity of the piled-up adjectives and the immediacy of “this.” Suddenly the narrator, whether ordinary or gifted, alert or passive, is swept up in the vivid presence of the deictic. This is the kind of effect highlighted in Heather Dubrow’s discerning study and unaccountably lost when John Ciardi and Allen Mandelbaum both translate “esta” with “that.”2 And then Dante masters the situation. “Thought” (not Ciardi’s “memory”) enters, at first seized by “fear,” but then initiating a one-hundred-canto teaching moment. “Treating of the good that I found” is not what people do in the throe of violent emotions. Indeed, he turns away from the terror to, in literal translation, “the other things that I there perceived.” The repeated “there” is inconspicuous, contracted from its two-syllable prose form “ivi,” to a single syllable “vi” and then elided to a single letter, “v” (and reduced by both these translators to a single “there”). But the inconspicuous pointing into the distance is the decisive moment when Dante begins to get a grip on himself and becomes a sage. Finding “the” good that was “there” doesn’t divinize him; in Paradise he learns God’s nature, which includes, as one of its three stages, the infinitely broader “love of the true good, which is holy bliss” (Paradiso 30.41).3 Dante’s initial “there” is not there yet. But it is on the way.Dubrow’s tough-minded, generous, learned, sensitive, and thoroughly illuminating little book rarely strays from its narrow path in early modern English poetry, but it shines a bright light that for me instantly caught Dante in its beam. You can learn a lot from her intensely close readings about specialist discussions and from her new insights concerning her specific examples: Spenser’s “Epithalamion,” Shakespeare’s sonnets, Lady Mary Wroth’s Song 1, John Donne’s “Hymn to God my God, in my Sicknesse.” But I read the book as a nonspecialist and will concentrate not on what it contains but on where it can take you.Dubrow took me to Dante thanks to observations like the following, on the closing couplet of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 (“All this the world well knows, yet none knows well / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell”). “By writing ‘All this’ (129.13) rather than ‘All that’ the speaker arguably suggests what the deictic in the next line (‘this hell’ [129.14]) implies as well: he himself cannot escape the temptations and depredations of lust… . In short, we see again that context can shape a ‘this’ into a marker of affection or of entrapment—or of both in a sequence where the two are so closely connected” (72). Deictics—pointing words—are the opposite of fixtures; along with other spatial and temporal shifters, notably including the personal pronouns that Dubrow mentions only in passing, they bring immediacy into utterances meant to stand the test of time. With its abundant notes to other literary scholars, linguists, and spatial theorists, Dubrow’s work has no pretense to primacy, but the synthetic overview, dense with meticulous observation, constantly stimulates renewed attention to “that extraordinary four-letter word ‘here’” (10) and to many other life-giving formulas in poems then and now.Dubrow’s core insight is that deictics are multidimensional. Not merely pointers, they also structure space, always differentially: every “here” posits a contrasting “there.” Then they have a temporal dimension: “here” is always to some degree “now,” while “there” generally implies a time past or future when it might have been, or might become, proximate. As pointers, they carry a sense of audience and often create a world impression, sometimes characterized by Dubrow as a “soundscape.” Of course, the audience can often be the self, and especially in those cases deictics are prone to self-referentiality. They are thus instruments of metapoetics, particularly in Shakespeare’s sonnets, where “this” frequently comes to mean “this utterance,” “this poem,” even “this kind of poem,” at the same time that it means “this situation” and references the sonnet’s contents. The implications and ambiguities of deictics create tensions and become the ground for intense emotions, especially in the concentrated world of short poems. “Here” is a world that involves “me,” often passionately, sometimes despairingly, and not infrequently competitively. Dubrow doesn’t bother with Donne’s “The Sun Rising,” surely too obvious an example for her to pick, but that makes it a good instance to introduce in a short review, with its repeated invocations of “here,” echoed by “hear,” sending the sun on a fruitless expedition to elsewheres that aren’t dignified by a “there” and that Donne punningly takes self-possession of with a wayward “mine” (“both th’ Indias of spice and mine”). Emotionalism, of course, comes into conflict with rationalism and destabilizes it, and an insistently repeated theme (found on eleven different pages but unfortunately omitted from the index) is the ensuing “blurring” that Dubrow now, as in earlier books, often associates with queer perspectives.Dubrow’s many close readings are invariably subtle, regularly adjudicate among numerous recent and older critical essays, and contribute both insights and resources. You don’t have to read the whole book to get the spirit; any one core chapter will get you going, averaging under twenty rich pages, though you won’t regret reading all of them. I found the three framing chapters likewise highly informative but conceptually less rewarding. Dubrow has long been distinguished, among other virtues, for catholicity, with her eyes wide open to poetry and the other arts from the Middle Ages to—especially—modernism and after. Her introduction situates the enterprise with respect to practical criticism (Helen Vendler), cognitive studies, linguistic theory, poetics, formalism (Caroline Levine), and gender theory. The ensuing first chapter builds bridges to a substantial collection of mostly contemporary poets and introduces a set of inventive terms that highlight some of the more intriguing gestures she finds in deictics: deictic chains, convergers, expellers, deictoids, the colonesque, and (for wine connoisseurs) terroir. I don’t know that these terms and some others introduced later will catch on; indeed, deictoids never come back, and terroir, evoked rather than defined in chapter 1, puts in only a brief, still-metaphorical reappearance in the final sentences of the Wroth chapter. And the conclusion contains generalizing reflections and precepts, such as signaling “the pedagogical urgency of teaching this type of close reading both to undergraduates and to the graduate students who could in turn teach it themselves” (121). I agree, but the readings themselves are a lot peppier.Superficially, deictics seem single minded, and occasionally they are. But the foundational insight in the book is how often and how complexly they are ambiguous. (Foundations aren’t always meant to be seen. Ambiguity is discussed on thirteen separate pages, but indexed only on two and only as a subtopic to “this.”) Given the prominence of this term and the allusive title of the Wroth chapter, “Lady Mary Wroth’s Song 1 and Some Versions of Pastoral Deixis,” it was startling to find William Empson mentioned only in the title of an essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets cited in a footnote. To be sure, deictics don’t figure among Empson’s complex words, and his more dramatically focused sociology differs in its emphases from the more personal and lyrical tenor of Dubrow’s book. Empson insistently differentiates, whereas a few pages in Dubrow’s Shakespeare chapter merely gesture toward inventorying differences along with similarities between the poems and plays. On one page she writes, “Similarly, as we will see” (62); on the next, “Lyric poetry, however, often wears its reflexive deictics with a difference: as we will see” (63). But what “we” finally “see” when the topic concludes on the next two pages is that there are many open possibilities, more alluded to than shown in the following sequence of sentences: “This yet again reminds us, too… . On another level, however… . Yet the fact that [etc.], thus prompting us to observe that … in many such instances” (64–65). Empson’s systems can often seem jerry-rigged, but there is still a scaffold; he aims to define and not just to project possibilities. In particular, his Feelings and Emotions might give clearer definition to Dubrow’s discussions. At times I came to wish that she were less generous and more assertive.The difference between the critics comes to a head in the topic of blurring. “The heritage of early modern pastoral writers included legacies that generated the use of deictics to suggest blurred borders” (80). Thus, again typically, Dubrow highlights “the blurrings and the mergings” in Donne (94), though it seems to me a stretch to claim that a poet “always dwells on edges, verges” (94) when “The Sun Rising,” one of his most-taught poems, ends with the lines, “Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; / This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.” “The queering of space gestures towards areas for future work” (112), Dubrow writes in her conclusion, but her work often seems to rest content with demonstrating that the ambiguities are there, using modal verbs that open up possibilities. Empson, by contrast, judges William Morris’s “thinning or blurring of texture” to be “disastrous.”4 Indeed, as he writes, “the later metaphysical poets came to take the conceit for granted, came to blur its sharp edge till they were writing something like nineteenth-century poetry.”5Stylistically, Empson and Dubrow represent two extremes. Sometimes Empson’s saw-toothed prose will be more helpful, at other times Dubrow’s cushioned and judicious encouragement. Less harsh on Romanticism than Empson was, she ends a paragraph on Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias” open minded: “might we perhaps sense a blurring of voices, even a kind of voice-over, in which the initial speaker joins in the final observation, thus further undercutting the assumption of an epicenter?” (32). And the following paragraph, on Keats’s late fragment, “This living hand,” ends with another good yet tentative insight: “Thus, I would add, the hand is queered in the sense of being denied a stable identity and materiality that can, as it were, be grasped” (33). As a queer theorist, you might prefer someone like Tim Dean, not resting content with cautiously affirming a destabilizing presence. In a different sort of book, the hesitancy about probing consequences might be a substantial defect. But the point of Dubrow’s short treatise is to offer a guide to existing research and to open doors for others, and for me she did that wonderfully. Another short book of hers, decades ago, embodied the same spirit, concluding thus: “Generic categories and principles rarely provide simple answers to problems about literature—but they regularly offer us one of the surest and most suggestive means of seeking those answers.”6 She remains more a seeker than an answerer, but the new book is more probing by far, with a quest that is intensively and rewardingly pursued.Notes1. Dante Alighieri, La divina commedia, ed. C. H. Grandgent (Boston: Heath, 1933), 12–13. The English is from John Ciardi, trans., The Divine Comedy (New York: New American Library, 1954), 28.2. See Allen Mandelbaum, trans., The Divine Comedy: Inferno, by Dante Alighieri (New York: Bantam, 1980), 5.3. John Ciardi, trans., The Paradise, by Dante Alighieri (New York: New American Library, 1970), 329.4. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 28.5. Ibid., 166.6. Heather Dubrow, Genre (London: Methuen, 1982), 118. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 116, Number 3February 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/700673HistoryPublished online September 27, 2018 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) is one of the most important Italian writers, well-known for his magnum opus the Divine Comedy. This article investigates the Urduphone world's engagement with Dante from the late 19th century to the post-colonial period. As India was ruled by the British, English writers, specifically Shakespeare and Milton, were the most famous foreign literary figures in colonial India. Dante, even though he had no official patronage, also made his appearance in Urdu print culture and is frequently referred to by Urdu writers and critics. There are three distinct ways in which Dante is engaged with in Urdu. The first dimension concerns essays about Dante's life and work in Urdu periodicals, and this article will present an overview of these. Secondly, several full and partial translations of the Divine Comedy have been produced in Urdu. This dimension is particularly significant because of Dante's treatment of Prophet Mūḥammad in the Divine Comedy, and the article will attempt to highlight the strategies used by translators to deal with those passages. Finally, Dante has frequently been juxtaposed with Mūḥammad Iqbāl because of the similarities between the Divine Comedy and Javed Nama, both said to be modeled after the story of Miʿrāj in Islam. The article argues that this engagement with Dante in Urdu resulted due to the Divine Comedy's inspiration from Muslim sources, as claimed by the Spanish orientalist Miguel Asin Palacios in his book Islam and the Divine Comedy.

Muhammad's (pbuh) journey to Miraj has become a source of inspiration for numerous Muslim and non-Muslim philosophers, mystics, and authors. A significant number of specifics and topographical outlines of scenes and episodic depictions in the Divine Comedy, the types or analogous models of which did not appear in the various versions of Muhammad's mirage narrative, also have antecedents and models, either akin to or identical in the Qur'an, hadith, or other Islamic literature describing the afterlife. The work Risaletu'l Gufran by Ebu’l-Ala el-Maarri was composed at the beginning of the 11th century, while Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy was created in the latter half of the 13th century. Regardless of the geographical and temporal distances, these two works share numerous meeting points. The issue of Dante Alighieri's influence by Islamic eschatological themes, despite countless literary and historical debates and controversies, remains unresolved. Similarly unresolved is Dante's boldness in incorporating pagan figures and polytheistic elements in the “Christian masterpiece of the Middle Ages.”

In depicting a comprehensive religious world view, Karl Ristikivi’s series of historical novels is structured, like Dante’s Divine Comedy , according to the philosophy of the gothic cathedral. With characters, events and themes corresponding with Dante’s masterpiece, the novels form a tri-level structure based on Christian myths. The novels are delineated by associations with paradise ( The Burning Flag, The Bridal Veil, Noble Hearts ), purgatory ( The Last Citadel, The Song of Joy, Dragon’s Teeth ) and hell ( The Riders of Death, A Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Double Play ). Contrary to the philosophy of increasing light found in Divine Comedy , Ristikivi’s historical series of novels portray the descent from light to darkness, from unity to fragmentation, from asceticism to sexuality, and from elevated language and style to comedy and grotesquery. In the first two trilogies, the characters’ ethical bearing steadily deteriorates. As well as comparisons to paradise and its inhabitants, a key theme of the paradise novels is the kingdom of Christ. The virtuous heroes of The Burning Flag and The Bridal Veil , Konradin von Hohenstaufen and St. Catherine of Siena, symbolize two aspects of the kingdom of Christ: the empire and the church. Both characters are also associated with the image of a mountain where salvation is at the top. The model for this is the Mount of Purgatory in Divine Comedy , which has earthly paradise at the top. In the purgatory novels, the characters and motifs are associated, as in Dante’s work, with the cultural sphere. These three novels are permeated with themes such as penitence, guilt and judgement. Brimming with inhumanity and discord, the hell novels feature themes related to the Tower of Babel and making a pact with the devil. Another of Ristikivi’s novels, the metaphysical All Souls’ Night also follows the structure of Divine Comedy and can therefore be regarded as part of the historical series. The world of All Souls’ Night is labryinthian; hierarchies have crumbled in the contemporary atheistic world. The themes of Dante’s masterpiece also appear in Island of Miracles , an interim story that parodies modern society. Similar to All Souls’ Night , Island of Miracles blends paradise, hell and purgatory. The crumbling of hierarchies also appears in the third trilogy, which deals with the new age, symbolizing Ristikivi’s scepticism about the secularised new and modern age. The works that feature chaotic hierarchies are in contrast to the series’ orderly cathedral-like structure followed in the first and second trilogies that take place in the Middle Ages. Modeled after the structure of gothic cathedral and Divine Comedy , Ristikivi’s historical series, with its repetitive and contrasting themes, forms a tightly linked whole. A vivid example of this structure is the motif of the heavenly carriage that reappears in Ristikivi’s texts, inspired by Divine Comedy .

The essay is divided into two parts. The first deals with the presence of Lombardy in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Some characters of Lombard origin are analyzed and also the allusions to the Lombard capital, Milan. We come to the conclusion that the characters, the cities, the Lombard principalities have a lot of prominence in Dante’s work. The author sees in this region a multiplicity of civil, cultural and political experiences far superior to other Italian regions (even if Tuscany and Florence have a more relevant presence). The second part briefly investigates the fact that the renewed interest in Dante originates in the early nineteenth century in Milan, where several editions of his works are printed and comments and studies are developed. It is also important to point out that the interpretation of Dante as the first and greatest Italian writer must be framed in the Italian culture of the first decades of the nineteenth century, when romantic poetics arrived in Italy and at the same time the ideas of the Risorgimento spread, so much so that we trace in those same decades Dantesque influences also in the creative works of writers and artists from the Lombardy area.