This volume provides the first systematic study of the translation and reception of Dante's Vita Nova in the Anglophone world, reconstructing for the first time the contexts and genesis of its English-language afterlife from the early nineteenth century to the present day.
Dante is one of the foremost authors of the Western canon, and his Vita Nova has been repeatedly translated into English over the past two centuries. However, there exists no comprehensive account of the critical, scholarly, and creative English-language reception of Dante's work. This collection brings together scholars from Dante Studies, Translation Studies, English Studies, and Book History to examine the translation and reception of the Vita Nova among modern English-speaking publics, in both academic and non-academic contexts, and thus represents a major contribution to Dante Studies.
This volume will be an essential reference point for scholars and students in English and Italian studies, literary and cultural studies, and translation and reception studies in the UK, Ireland, USA and Italy, where Dante is taught and researched.
About the Author: Federica Coluzzi is Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Warwick. She was previously Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Cork. Her first monograph Dante Beyond Influence: Rethinking Reception in Victorian Literary Culture came out in 2021 with Manchester University Press. Her research encompasses reception theory and Dante studies, nineteenth-century periodicals, history of publishing and reading. She has published in Dante Studies, Tre Corone, Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing, Nineteenth Century Prose, Studium and Strumenti Critici.
Jacob Blakesley is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature and Literary Translation at the University of Leeds, where he co-directs the Leeds Centre for Dante Studies. He directs the Leeds Studies on Dante series for Peter Lang (with Matthew Treherne), and the Routledge Studies in Literary Translation series (with Duncan Large). He has published two monographs, A Sociological Approach to Poetry Translation: Modern European Poet-Translators (Routledge, 2018) and Modern Italian Poets: Translators of the Impossible (University of Toronto 2014), and edited Sociologies of Poetry Translation: Emerging Perspectives (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is currently writing the first global translation history of Dante's Commedia.
