The twenty-five original essays in this remarkable book constitute both a state of the art survey of Dante scholarship and a manifesto for new understandings of one of the world's great poets. The fruit of an historic conference called by the Dante Society of America, the essays confront a range of important questions. What theories, methods, and issues are unique to Dante scholarship? How are they changing? What is the essence of the distinctive American Dante tradition? Why--and how--do we read Dante in today's global, postmodern culture? From John Ahern on the first copies of the "Commedia to Peter Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff on Dante after modernism, the essays shed brilliant new light on Dante's texts, his world, and what we make of his legacy.

Teodolinda Barolini, past President of the Dante Society of America, is Lorenzo Da Ponte Professor of Italian at Columbia University. She is the author of Dante's Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy and The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante, and the co-editor, with H. Wayne Storey, of Dante for the New Millennium (Fordham).
H. Wayne Storey, editor of the Fordham Series in Medieval Studies, teaches at Indiana University at Bloomington.