The Oxford Handbook of Dante contains forty-four specially written chapters that provide a thorough and creative reading of Dante''s oeuvre. It gathers an intergenerational and international team of scholars encompassing diverse approaches from the fields of Anglo-American, Italian, and continental scholarship and spanning several disciplines: philology, material culture, history, religion, art history, visual studies, theory from the classical to the contemporary, queer, post- and de-colonial, and feminist studies. The volume combines a rigorous reassessment of Dante''s formation, themes, and sources, with a theoretically up-to-date focus on textuality, thereby offering a new critical Dante. The volume is divided into seven sections: ''Texts and Textuality''; ''Dialogues''; ''Transforming Knowledge''; Space(s) and Places''; ''A Passionate Selfhood''; ''A Non-linear Dante''; and ''Nachleben''. It seeks to challenge the Commedia-centric approach (the conviction that notwithstanding its many contradictions, Dante''s works move towards the great reservoir of poetry and ideas that is the Commedia), in order to bring to light a non-teleological way in which these works relate amongst themselves. Plurality and the openness of interpretation appear as Dante''s very mark, coexisting with the attempt to create an all-encompassing mastership. The Handbook suggests what is exciting about Dante now and indicate where Dante scholarship is going, or can go, in a global context.
