Dante & the Unorthodox
Dante & the Unorthodox

Author: James Miller

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 577

ISBN-13: 0889209278

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

During his lifetime, Dante was condemned as corrupt and banned from Florence on pain of death. But in 1329, eight years after his death, he was again viciously condemned—this time as a heretic and false prophet—by Friar Guido Vernani. From Vernani’s inquisitorial viewpoint, the author of the Commedia “seduced” his readers by offering them “a vessel of demonic poison” mixed with poetic fantasies designed to destroy the “healthful truth” of Catholicism. Thanks to such pious vituperations, a sulphurous fume of unorthodoxy has persistently clung to the mantle of Dante’s poetic fame. The primary critical purpose of Dante & the Unorthodox is to examine the aesthetic impulses behind the theological and political reasons for Dante’s allegory of mid-life divergence from the papally prescribed “way of salvation.” Marking the septicentennial of his exile, the book’s eighteen critical essays, three excerpts from an allegorical drama, and a portfolio of fourteen contemporary artworks address the issue of the poet’s conflicted relation to orthodoxy. By bringing the unorthodox out of the realm of “secret things,” by uncensoring them at every turn, Dante dared to oppose the censorious regime of Latin Christianity with a transgressive zeal more threatening to papal authority than the demonic hostility feared by Friar Vernani.

Jung, Dante, and the Making of the Red Book: Of Fire and Form
Jung, Dante, and the Making of the Red Book: Of Fire and Form

Author: Tommaso Priviero

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-08-04

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 100092243X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book explores the genesis of the Red Book (or Liber Novus), through the lens of Jung’s lifelong confrontation with Dante and, in doing so, provides the first-ever thorough comparative analysis of the intertextual and symbolical correspondences between Liber Novus and the Commedia. Starting from Jung’s multifaceted fascination with Dante and his pivotal role in the former’s visionary material at historical, hermeneutical, and psychological levels, the book challengingly envisions Liber Novus as Jung’s Divine Comedy. This work finds a new way of approaching Jung’s understanding of concepts such as "visionary works" and "visionary mind" and considers how this approach can enhance our vision of depth psychology. Through various thematics such as the metanoia and the symbolism of animals, as well as the transformative role of the feminine and the erotic and spiritual imagery of the soul, this work revolves around the Jung-Dante correlation. Offering an original perspective within the field of Jungian and Dante scholarship, this book will be of great interest to academics and postgraduate students studying in the areas of Jung, Dante, analytical psychology, depth psychology, hermeneutics and Western esoteric currents and practices. The book will also appeal to Jungian analysts and psychoanalysts more broadly.

The Celestial Tradition
The Celestial Tradition

Author: Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

Published: 2010-10-30

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1554588057

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Despite the painstaking work of Pound scholars, the mythos of The Cantos has yet to be properly understood — primarily because until now its occult sources have not been examined sufficiently. Drawing upon archival as well as recently published material, this study traces Pound’s intimate engagement with specific occultists (W.B. Yeats, Allen Upward, Alfred Orage, and G.R.S. Mead) and their ideas. The author argues that speculative occultism was a major factor in the evolution of Pound’s extraordinary aesthetic and religious sensibility, much noticed in Pound criticism. The discussion falls into two sections. The first section details Pound’s interest in particular occult movements. It describes the tradition of Hellenistic occultism from Eleusis to the present, and establishes that Pound’s contact with the occult began at least as early as his undergraduate years and that he came to London already primed on the occult. Many of his London acquaintances were unquestionably occultists. The second section outlines a tripartite schema for The Cantos (katabasis/dromena/epopteia) which, in turn, is applied to the poem. It is argued here that The Cantos is structured on the model of a initiation rather than a journey, and that the poem does not so much describe an initiation rite as enact one for the reader. In exploring and attempting to understand Pounds’ occultism and its implications to his [Pounds’] oeuvre, Tryphonopoulos sheds new light upon one of the great works of modern Western literature.