The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy

Download or read book The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy written by Christian Moevs and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-13 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The recovery of Dante's metaphysics-which are very different from our own-is essential, argues Christian Moevs, if we are to resolve what has been called 'the central problem in the interpretation of the Comedy.' That problem is what to make of the Comedy's claim to the status of revelation, vision, or experiential record - as something more than imaginative literature. In this book Moevs offers the first sustained treatment of the metaphysical picture that grounds and motivates the Comedy, and the relation between those metaphysics and Dante's poetics. Moevs arrives at the radical conclusion that Dante believed that all of what we perceive as reality, the spatio-temporal world, is in fact a creation or projection of conscious being. Armed with this new understanding, Moevs is able to shed light on a series of perennial issues in the interpretation of the Comedy.