Thesiss

As Aarati Kanekar states in Architecture's Pretexts: Spaces of Translation , a book addressing the issues of construction, translation and transformation of meaning across media, “there is always an element of metamorphosis when meaning is translated between one symbolic form an…

Imagination, love, reason: these three elements come together in a delicate balance to form the workings of the human mind. This dissertation explores these concepts and their intricate relationship as portrayed in key writings of Italian literature. I focus on authors of the It…

This thesis examines the genre of epic, and particularly Milton’s Paradise Lost. It argues that it is only in attending to the contextual interactions within Paradise Lost that its full meaning can be comprehended. It demonstrates that the poem not only narrates the Fall, but ac…

There have historically been numerous connections between the way that medieval Iberian Muslims conceptualized love, lust, and desire and the ways in which Western Europeans have expressed those same concepts, especially as potentially derived from the literary genre of the muwa…

This doctoral dissertation probes Dante's understanding of the potentially explosive clash between theology and history by focusing on the violent act of sacrifice. The introduction surveys the appearance of the word "sacrifice" in all of Dante's works. The rare term is found to…

Love at first sight has been a favorite theme of love poets through the ages. This ancient topic receives a new emphasis in the poetry of late medieval Europe, where the sight of the beloved is described by poets in increasingly technical terms. In particular, poets begin to emp…

This dissertation investigates “vertical readings” of the Commedia, i.e., the interpretive method that compares and contrasts same-numbered cantos in the three canticles of the poem: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Although there is a consensus that specific vertical readings…

This dissertation, titled Dante and the name of the vernacular: on "De Vulgari Eloquentia" and ‘Vulgare Latium’, studies how the meaning of the word ‘vernacular’ changed from the medieval to the early modern period by focusing on the text of Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia and the…

Dante’s Divine Comedy plots a literary history of epic poetry from the apparitions and mythologies of Homer through those of Vergil, Statius, and even St. Augustine. While Dante employs the standard conventions of epic poetry, he manipulates these standards in various ways, such…