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9780192866998

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Dante, Artist of Gesture offers, in its focus on gestures, a strikingly original perspective on Dante's poem. Skillfully organized, clearly and gracefully written, the book examines in six chapters the gesturality of the Divine Comedy in the context of visual culture of the period. It uncovers networks of gestural signification in the poem that resonate throughout the three canticles and in a synergistic relation with the iconographic, artistic and literary traditions surrounding the poem, ranging from the mosaics of the baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence, to fresco cycles by Giotto, to Botticelli's famous illustrations, as well as to Biblical and classical literary sources (especially Virgil), to lives of saints, to the influential Meditations on the Life of Christ. Gestural Dante will change the way we read and teach the poem. Dante, Artist of Gesture, explores the place and significance of bodily movement and gesture in Dante's works, above all in his poetic masterpiece, the Comedy. Webb investigates how gestures and postures are described and made visible throughout Dante's great poem, and demonstrates their rich implications-social, ethical and political-for the reader. Dante, Artist of Gesture is a remarkable tour de force both in the way it proposes new methodologies and tools of study for reading the gestural and in the way it offers original and powerful close readings of Dante's texts ... Elegantly written, meticulously researched and rich in methodological innovations, the book will be both an essential point of reference in Dante Studies and an indispensable mine for future work on the body, gesture, posture and affectivity in Medieval Studies and other related fields. * Simon Gilson FBA, Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford *

Gestural Dante offers, in its focus on gestures, a strikingly original perspective on Dante's poem. Skillfully organized, clearly and gracefully written, the book examines in six chapters the gesturality of the Divine Comedy in the context of visual culture of the period. It uncovers networks of gestural signification in the poem that resonate throughout the three canticles and in a synergistic relation with the iconographic, artistic and literary traditions surrounding the poem, ranging from the mosaics of the baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence, to fresco cycles by Giotto, to Botticelli's famous illustrations, as well as to Biblical and classical literary sources (especially Virgil), to lives of saints, to the influential Meditations on the Life of Christ. Gestural Dante will change the way we read and teach the poem. * Theodore J. Cachey Jr., Professor of Italian, Director of Graduate Studies in Italian * Dante, Artist of Gesture offers, in its focus on gestures, a strikingly original perspective on Dante's poem. Skillfully organized, clearly and gracefully written, the book examines in six chapters the gesturality of the Divine Comedy in the context of visual culture of the period. It uncovers networks of gestural signification in the poem that resonate throughout the three canticles and in a synergistic relation with the iconographic, artistic and literary traditions surrounding the poem, ranging from the mosaics of the baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence, to fresco cycles by Giotto, to Botticelli's famous illustrations, as well as to Biblical and classical literary sources (especially Virgil), to lives of saints, to the influential Meditations on the Life of Christ. Gestural Dante will change the way we read and teach the poem. Dante, Artist of Gesture, explores the place and significance of bodily movement and gesture in Dante's works, above all in his poetic masterpiece, the Comedy. Webb investigates how gestures and postures are described and made visible throughout Dante's great poem, and demonstrates their rich implications-social, ethical and political-for the reader. Dante, Artist of Gesture is a remarkable tour de force both in the way it proposes new methodologies and tools of study for reading the gestural and in the way it offers original and powerful close readings of Dante's texts ... Elegantly written, meticulously researched and rich in methodological innovations, the book will be both an essential point of reference in Dante Studies and an indispensable mine for future work on the body, gesture, posture and affectivity in Medieval Studies and other related fields. * Simon Gilson FBA, Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford *

Author Information

Heather Webb is the Professor of Medieval Italian Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Selwyn College. She received her PhD from Stanford University in 2004 and taught at The Ohio State University for eight years before coming to Cambridge. She is the author of two monographs, The Medieval Heart (2010), and Dante's Persons: An Ethics of the Transhuman (2016) and has co-edited five books, including Vertical Readings in Dante's 'Comedy' in three volumes, and the forthcoming Dante's 'Vita nova': A Collaborative Reading.

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