It must, therefore, come as no surprisethat the final chapter attacksthe current 'disorder'broughtaboutby postmodernistcriticaltheoryand itsbelief in the radical instability of language. Everyone from Frye on is castigated, yet they sincerely attempted to redressan obvious imbalance. Marksrails against their excesses, but better still,he offerstermsfor a reasonable,consideredcompromise. UNIVERSITY OF BAYREUTH RICHARD TAYLOR Dante'sModern Afterlife: Reception andResponse from Blaketo Heaney. Ed. by NICK HAVELY. Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's Press. I998. xiv + 270 pp. 45. 'Putout to sea, ignoble comradeslWhoserecordshallbe noble yet', LouisMacNeice singsin the finalpiece of the Collected Poems. These lines are quoted by Steve Ellisin hisfine articleon 'Dante and LouisMacNeice: A Sequel to the Commedia', the eighth in Nick Havely's collection. They could be taken as representative of Dante's modern 'afterlife' (the expression goes back to the title of Alan Charity'sjustly celebrated book of 1966, Events andtheir Afterlife: TheDialectics of Christian Typology in theBibleandDante).The echo they carry comes all the way from Ulysses's famous speech in Inferno, xxvI, itselfin many ways the tragicprefigurationof modernity, via Tennyson's 'Ulysses',one of the most Dantean, and most divided, texts of Victorian poetry. It might be interesting to know that when the 'old' astronautJohn Glenn was launched into space lastyear, the AmericanPoet Laureate,Robert Pinsky,read out thatvery Canto on televisionto celebratethe event. As modernity gives way to post-modernism, Dante's influence extends all over the world, particularly in English-speaking countries. At the beginning of our century there were Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Now, it is Seamus Heaney's and Derek Walcott'sturn. Indeed, the presentvolume ends with two essayson Walcott and Heaney, and with Heaney's own translationof Inferno, II,'The Deep and Savage Path'. The fourteen essays in the collection, briefly and skilfully introduced by Havely (with a very good selective bibliography on the subject),cover the ground from Thomas Gray to Gloria Naylor, offeringan ideal complement to Steve Ellis's DanteandEnglish Poetry (1983).They are dividedinto six chronologicalsections,from pre-Romanticism to 'Contemporary Directions', the fifth, devoted to 'Echoes in Post-WarItaly', being to my mind the only inadequate one as Sereni and Bassani are by no means representativeof Dante's presence in contemporaryItalian verse and prose (one might instead deal with Luzi, Sanguineti, Levi, and Sciascia, mentioned by Havely in his introduction). The collection does not aim at completeness, but rather at sounding the issue obliquely, by treating some of its most significantmoments. The storybegins, as is fitting,with Ugolino, whose shadowChaucercastoversubsequentEnglishliterature by recounting his death in the Monk'sTale, and who appearsin 1979 at the end of Heaney's Field Work(in fact, Ugolino recurs time and again in Dante'sModern Afterlife). Here, inJohn Roe's excellent piece, we wander from Gray'stranslationof the episode to his Eton College Ode viaSirJoshua Reynolds'sandJohann Heinrich Fuseli's paintings. We pass, then, to 'Romantic Readings', where the three contributions byJeremy Tambling (on the way in which Dante prompts Blake to 'allegorize' events), Stuart Curran (on 'figuration' in Dante and Shelley), and William Keach ('The Shelleys and Dante's Matilda'), by brilliantly exploiting Charity'snotions of foreshadowing and afterlife,reach one of the two climaxes in the volume. It must, therefore, come as no surprisethat the final chapter attacksthe current 'disorder'broughtaboutby postmodernistcriticaltheoryand itsbelief in the radical instability of language. Everyone from Frye on is castigated, yet they sincerely attempted to redressan obvious imbalance. Marksrails against their excesses, but better still,he offerstermsfor a reasonable,consideredcompromise. UNIVERSITY OF BAYREUTH RICHARD TAYLOR Dante'sModern Afterlife: Reception andResponse from Blaketo Heaney. Ed. by NICK HAVELY. Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's Press. I998. xiv + 270 pp. 45. 'Putout to sea, ignoble comradeslWhoserecordshallbe noble yet', LouisMacNeice singsin the finalpiece of the Collected Poems. These lines are quoted by Steve Ellisin hisfine articleon 'Dante and LouisMacNeice: A Sequel to the Commedia', the eighth in Nick Havely's collection. They could be taken as representative of Dante's modern 'afterlife' (the expression goes back to the title of Alan Charity'sjustly celebrated book of 1966, Events andtheir Afterlife: TheDialectics of Christian Typology in theBibleandDante).The echo they carry comes all the way from Ulysses's famous speech in Inferno, xxvI, itselfin...