--- product_id: 1694999 title: "Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity" price: "₩415057" currency: KRW in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.kr/products/1694999-reading-dante-from-here-to-eternity store_origin: KR region: South Korea --- # Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity **Price:** ₩415057 **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity - **How much does it cost?** ₩415057 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.kr](https://www.desertcart.kr/products/1694999-reading-dante-from-here-to-eternity) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description The best and most eloquent introduction to Dante for our time. Prue Shaw is one of the world's foremost authorities on Dante. Written with the general reader in mind, Reading Dante brings her knowledge to bear in an accessible yet expert introduction to his great poem. This is far more than an exegesis of Dante’s three-part Commedia . Shaw communicates the imaginative power, the linguistic skill and the emotional intensity of Dante’s poetry―the qualities that make the Commedia perhaps the greatest literary work of all time and not simply a medieval treatise on morality and religion. The book provides a graphic account of the complicated geography of Dante's version of the afterlife and a sure guide to thirteenth-century Florence and the people and places that influenced him. At the same time it offers a literary experience that lifts the reader into the universal realms of poetry and mythology, creating links not only to the classical world of Virgil and Ovid but also to modern art and poetry, the world of T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney and many others. Dante's questions are our questions: What is it to be a human being? How should we judge human behavior? What matters in life and in death? Reading Dante helps the reader to understand Dante’s answers to these timeless questions and to see how surprisingly close they sometimes are to modern answers. Reading Dante is an astonishingly lyrical work that will appeal to both those who’ve never read the Commedia and those who have. It underscores Dante's belief that poetry can change human lives. 34 illustrations Review: Excellent companion to Dante - “Reading Dante” is a sublime book, the work of a scholar who has spent fifty years studying, translating and editing the works of Dante Alighieri and his contemporaries in fourteenth century Italy. Prue Shaw seems to know her way around late medieval Florence and Tuscany as well as the byways of University College, London her academic home base. This is a book that one feels lucky if he encounters something like it every five years—beautifully written, packed with the result of a lifetime of scholarship and presented in a distinctive but easy to follow manner, organized thematically instead of the more typical “and then he went to the next circle where Virgil said...”. Even though “The Divine Comedy” is a narrative poem, Prue Shaw dispenses with a plot summary, a good idea since it would become simple chronology in inferior language or just a list of sins and horrors that await sinners. She shows us the experience of the journey, the sense of being at the pilgrim’s side as he is gradually changed by what he sees, hears, and feels, as he moves from a man ‘lost in a dark wood” to one who is “turned by the Love that moves the...stars.” Shaw deals with some of thorny questions of literary theory; for example the liquid identities of Dante as author, Dante as character, a pilgrim who writes poetry and Dante the author of the poem we are reading not by explaining theory—often an excellent way to kill the reader’s interest—but by showing how the various guises adopted by Dante shift and fuse into each other depending on theme. A masterful performance, taking a fourteenth-century allegorical poem on sin and redemption, written in a medieval Florentine vernacular following the theology of the time and letting the reader discover its heretofore hidden beauties. She makes a supremely difficult undertaking, given the remoteness of the historical and cultural period in which Dante writes and the complexity of his language seem, if not easy then less difficult. Most importantly “Reading Dante” succeeds in persuading on to do exactly that: begin or continue reading Dante Review: Great book for the initiated as well as the uninitiated - Shaw's is an outstanding book about an outstanding book. Those unfamiliar with the Divine Comedy can find in "Reading Dante" a very well-written introduction to what Dante's great book is all about. The writing is clear and free of jargon; Shaw gets into the politics and literary tastes of 13th century Florence just enough to provide appropriate background. She quotes short passages of the Divine Comedy to illustrate specific points, but one could take advantage of "Reading Dante" to begin a more extensive reading of Dante's masterpiece. For those who have read the Divine Comedy and are, perhaps, looking for a discussion of the main issues that this work raises, "Reading Dante" is invaluable. The questions are presented explicitly and in clear language and the arguments that follow are concise and equally lucid. Professor Shaw does a particularly good job in the discussion of Dante's ability to use all the resources of the then new Italian language to create a totally original masterpiece. I think there are no other commentaries to the Divine Comedy that are as wide-ranging in scope and satisfactory in the treatment. I read the hard cover version, nice illustrations ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #2,092,364 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #14 in Italian Literary Criticism (Books) #189 in Poetry Literary Criticism (Books) #2,385 in Literary Criticism & Theory | | Customer Reviews | 4.4 out of 5 stars 182 Reviews | ## Images ![Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71rWI-mLIuL.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Excellent companion to Dante *by E***E on July 7, 2014* “Reading Dante” is a sublime book, the work of a scholar who has spent fifty years studying, translating and editing the works of Dante Alighieri and his contemporaries in fourteenth century Italy. Prue Shaw seems to know her way around late medieval Florence and Tuscany as well as the byways of University College, London her academic home base. This is a book that one feels lucky if he encounters something like it every five years—beautifully written, packed with the result of a lifetime of scholarship and presented in a distinctive but easy to follow manner, organized thematically instead of the more typical “and then he went to the next circle where Virgil said...”. Even though “The Divine Comedy” is a narrative poem, Prue Shaw dispenses with a plot summary, a good idea since it would become simple chronology in inferior language or just a list of sins and horrors that await sinners. She shows us the experience of the journey, the sense of being at the pilgrim’s side as he is gradually changed by what he sees, hears, and feels, as he moves from a man ‘lost in a dark wood” to one who is “turned by the Love that moves the...stars.” Shaw deals with some of thorny questions of literary theory; for example the liquid identities of Dante as author, Dante as character, a pilgrim who writes poetry and Dante the author of the poem we are reading not by explaining theory—often an excellent way to kill the reader’s interest—but by showing how the various guises adopted by Dante shift and fuse into each other depending on theme. A masterful performance, taking a fourteenth-century allegorical poem on sin and redemption, written in a medieval Florentine vernacular following the theology of the time and letting the reader discover its heretofore hidden beauties. She makes a supremely difficult undertaking, given the remoteness of the historical and cultural period in which Dante writes and the complexity of his language seem, if not easy then less difficult. Most importantly “Reading Dante” succeeds in persuading on to do exactly that: begin or continue reading Dante ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Great book for the initiated as well as the uninitiated *by G***M on September 30, 2014* Shaw's is an outstanding book about an outstanding book. Those unfamiliar with the Divine Comedy can find in "Reading Dante" a very well-written introduction to what Dante's great book is all about. The writing is clear and free of jargon; Shaw gets into the politics and literary tastes of 13th century Florence just enough to provide appropriate background. She quotes short passages of the Divine Comedy to illustrate specific points, but one could take advantage of "Reading Dante" to begin a more extensive reading of Dante's masterpiece. For those who have read the Divine Comedy and are, perhaps, looking for a discussion of the main issues that this work raises, "Reading Dante" is invaluable. The questions are presented explicitly and in clear language and the arguments that follow are concise and equally lucid. Professor Shaw does a particularly good job in the discussion of Dante's ability to use all the resources of the then new Italian language to create a totally original masterpiece. I think there are no other commentaries to the Divine Comedy that are as wide-ranging in scope and satisfactory in the treatment. I read the hard cover version, nice illustrations ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ An excellent and well-written guide that has encouraged me to re-read ... *by J***C on September 16, 2014* An excellent and well-written guide that has encouraged me to re-read the Commedia. My only reservations would be that I don't believe the author really engaged with Dante's religious faith - as opposed to his relationship with the institutional church; and that the final chapter on 'Words' was rather lost on me as I have very little (pocissimo?) 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