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“... 1985 novel which has many formal similarities with The Last Magician (including an obsession with Dante), are all engaged in transgressing boundaries, whether willingly or not, and the title story of her collection Isobars makes explicit its preoccupation with ‘ideas of order’ imposed upon a messy and shifting reality Lines drawn on a map, she wrote in ...”

“... which develop with its movement, and take their structure from the narrative which unites them. Dante, in the Convivio, describes four such ‘levels’ of meaning, and the tradition which he exemplifies has continued to the present day. In particular, it can be seen in the French explication de texte, whether dressed in its old, cold, surgical garments, or ...”

“... is not out to wound but is something other than shadow fencing’. Towards the end of the book Dante comes in as the poet in whom, as it were, all the poets meet: all admit, sometimes fulsomely, their indebtedness to him, often in the form of creative translation or imitation. Ricks is perhaps at his best in this book when writing about Eliot’s use of ...”

“... white-washed cells, so tragically tidy, but with books in them. In one I found a translation of Dante, and a Shelley. Strange and beautiful it seemed to me that the sorrow of a single Florentine in exile should, hundreds of years afterwards, lighten the sorrow of some common prisoner in a modern gaol, and one murderer with melancholy eyes – to be hung ...”

“... years,’ Hanta, the book-pulper and paper-baler of Too Loud a Solitude tells us, as though he was Dante. (This apparently began as a poem, too, no doubt with ‘35 years’ its refrain.) ‘For 35 years now I’ve been in wastepaper … For 35 years now I’ve been compacting wastepaper … For 35 years I’d compacted wastepaper in my hydraulic press, never ...”

“... crown to stirrup. He rode on almost in blindness.’ Pearce is a man of some culture – he reads Dante and Shakespeare, thinks of Odysseus as he travels home – but the lineaments of his experiences may be typical of those ‘BOR’s’ who served in the colonies during the war. And his lack of liberal sympathy may have one merit: for it is perhaps a ...”

“... follows a disquisition on myth, with reference to Totem and Taboo, Milton’s Nativity Ode and Dante. As to the interference of fairies in human life, we have to accept it as demonstrating the ills, major and minor, that fortune brings on us and which we are obliged to bear. This is a matter of duty: ‘our duties are ...”

“... ranges through some of the mighty monuments of Western literature, from Homer, medieval romance, Dante and Rabelais to Montaigne, Cervantes, Goethe, Stendhal and a good many authors besides, scanning their work for symptoms of realism. His criterion for selection, however, is more political than formal or epistemological. The question is whether we can find ...”

“... both aimed at the disruption of the realist novel though the use of erudite fantasy, drawing on Dante and Plato and Milton; they wanted to make contemporary England strange. Eliot, perhaps, was just happy to find another Christian writer, a Modernist poet even, in the commercial publishing world. To all those he influenced, Williams stood as a symbol of ...”

“... celebrated poems of the age are both travel narratives. Under the guidance of Virgil and Beatrice, Dante toured hell, purgatory and paradise, while Chaucer and his merry crew made the easier trek from London to Canterbury, led by a raucous innkeeper. It has been said that the average medieval peasant lived and died without travelling more than ten miles from ...”

“... another pirouette), it digresses in order to situate the Taino myths in relation to Ovid and Dante, whose own metamorphoses would have framed the responses of European readers to the Taino material. The two form a convenient polarity, with Ovid representing metamorphosis free of any fixed moral status, and Dante its ...”

“... fact be your complement.’ Motherland’s epigraph is from the second canto of the Inferno, where Dante follows Virgil on ‘that savage path’, and the quest of the fat, childish narrator, ‘a journey without a known endpoint or even a method by which to plot a course’, is also undertaken in the company of a guiding authority, a wise but embittered ...”

“... poetry, fiction, philosophy, science and travel writing, once eagerly explored by Europeans (Dante, for instance, seems to have had more contact than most of us today with these works), still remain utterly obscure to many, including someone like me, who is actively interested. Kilito began as a scholar of the classical Arabic tradition, both before and ...”

“... that he planned one further volume only, which was to be his Paradiso: a resolution modelled on Dante, and on classical epic (the Aeneid as well as the Odyssey), and incorporating Confucius, Scotus Erigena, hymns to Aphrodite, and much else besides. The much else besides turned out to include, by 1948, the defeat of the Fascist regime whose spokesman he had ...”

“... said, but Mandelstam’s was ‘a purely ethereal Rome’. It was a ‘country of the mind, only Dante’. He seems in fact to have managed a few days there. Mirsky, author of an eccentrically splendid English history of Russian literature, had gone back to Moscow a convinced Leninist and had indeed perished in the camps, though he probably met a drier ...”