Dante and the Victorians

Book excerpt: Milbank (English, U. of Cambridge) argues that an understanding of Victorianism's reception of Dante is essential for understanding its notions of history, nationalism, aesthetics, and gender as well as the often strange intersections between any two or more of them. She offers a new genealogy of literature in modern times, substituting a continuous Dantism for the conventional tale of Victorian realism and historicism challenged by modernist symbolism. She also finds Dante to be the first writer to historicize, fictionalize, and humanize the eternal realm, and therefore the route through which history, secularized fiction, and positivist humanism can be traced to a lost transcendent. Distributed in the US by St. Martin's Press. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR