MARGINAL DANTISMO THE SCHOLARLY RECEPTION OF DANTE IN LATE VICTORIAN BRITAIN (1860S – 1910S)

Abstract

In the history of Dante’s British reception, the Victorian period represents the moment in which the British interest in Dante reached its fullest and most sophisticated expression as a composite cultural relationship encompassing the literary, the critical and the scholarly dimension. While contemporary scholarship has prioritised the study of the appropriation and absorption of Dante in nineteenth-century poetry and prose, this thesis reassesses the largely marginalised impact of the forms and agents of noncreative reception. In particular, the thesis examines the transformation of Dante into an object of specialised study, and expounds the sophistication of the Victorian interpretative approach, progressively oriented towards the enhancement of the critical understanding of Dante (of his life, works, historical and cultural context), and the recognition of the scholarly value of such knowledge. The thesis identifies the late Victorian period (1860s-1910s) as the moment in which British dantofilia intended as, the largely amateur praxis of reading and translating Dante, began to develop into dantismo: a serious hermeneutic engagement pursued by socio-culturally diverse publics of Victorian men and women writers (translators, critics and scholars) acting individually or within learned societies. The thesis singles out five exemplary case-studies of Victorian Dantean hermeneutics, from these Matthew Arnold and William E. Gladstone, through Philip H. Wicksteed, Maria Francesca Rossetti and a sizeable group of Victorian women dantiste, to the Oxford, London and Manchester Dante Societies. The thesis recovers the experiences of these marginal dantisti thus far excluded from the creative-centric reception canon, and illustrates how they gained authority as public and professional mediators of Dantean knowledge, and fostered the conditions for the institutionalisation of an independent tradition of British Dante studies. Through the textual, book-historical and material study of a miscellaneous corpus of published works and archival material (consisting of notebooks, diaries, and reading lists, marginalia and personal papers), the thesis singles out three distinct and yet complementary forms in which the British scholarly reception of Dante found expression. Firstly, as a private and self-disciplined practice of study carried out by learned individuals for their own intellectual curiosity and public interests, such as literary criticism (Chapters 1 and 2). Secondly, as an outward engagement aimed at popularising and commercialising specialised knowledge for the mass public of general readers and students of Dante through didactic materials and cycles of lectures (Chapters 3 and 4). Finally, as a discrete academic discipline practised by professional scholars within (and beyond) learned societies: institutions devoted to the production and promotion of philological, textual and historical scholarship on Dante (Chapter 5). The ultimate aim is to interpret this change within the broader context of Victorian intellectual and cultural history, by demonstrating that the critical and scholarly reception of Dante was a multifaceted phenomenon, which touched on a multiplicity of aspects pertaining to the history of knowledge, scholarship and education as well as the history of authorship and reading of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Daniela Caselli (Supervisor) & Guyda Armstrong (Supervisor)