Prue Shaw

Dante’s epic story of a man’s journey from darkness to the revelation of divine light is one of the greatest works of Western literature. Because of its length and its language, it is viewed as forbidding. Undergraduate courses often cherry-pick from the Inferno and barely glance at Purgatorio and Paradiso. In The Essential Commedia, Prue Shaw fillets the epic to create an absorbing tour of all three realms of the afterlife. Extensive passages, astutely excerpted, are offered in translation alongside the original, making it easy to read Dante in English, Italian or both. The translation into modern, idiomatic English avoids archaisms, padding and syntactic contortions. With no loss of rigour, a complex text is rendered accessible by a teacher whose decades of experience enable her to highlight those aspects of the poem readers will appreciate. Prue Shaw’s, Reading Dante, was praised as: "[an] experience of a lifetime[...]"—The Spectator "Writing an introduction [to The Divine Comedy] for the general reader is not an easy task. Prue Shaw has done this in a way that manages to be at the same time scholarly, compelling and original."—The Times Literary Supplement [Shaw] keeps us so enthralled with her compelling and fast-paced prose that the only reason one would want to put down this book is to open the one she is talking about."—Times Higher Education

Keenly aware that thousands of books have been written about The Divine Comedy, Prue Shaw—one of the world’s foremost Dante authorities–is convinced that an accessible, non-scholarly work that explicated Dante is needed. Just as Dante becomes a poet with a prophetic mission, Reading Dante becomes far more than an exegesis of Dante’s three-part Commedia. It offers a literary experience that lifts the reader into the universal realms of poetry and mythology, revealing how one can recover time-past through memory and language. Whether challenging the notion that Dante was vindictive, decoding the numerology that can confound readers or positioning Dante’s tortured life within the framework of fourteenth-century Florence, Shaw creates an astonishingly lyrical work that will appeal to both those who’ve never read the Commedia and those who have. Reading Dante underscores Dante’s belief that poetry can change human lives.

Giacomo Leopardi, Italy's great poet of the Romantic age, is the author of some of the most beautiful and best-loved poems in the Italian language and some of the most remarkable letters in European literature. The interest of the letters in both biographical and literary: they document the background - the difficult personal circumstances, the intense and troubled family relationships, the contacts and friendships with other writers - against which a haunting and compelling poetic voice came to maturity. The letters, not previously available in English except fragmentarily, are here offered in a new translation undertaken to celebrate the poet's birth in 1798. In the light of growing academic interest in Italy and the re-organization of many university courses in Italian along interdisciplinary lines, this book series brings together different scholarly perspectives on Italy and its culture. Italian Perspectives incorporates books and essay collections and is published under Maney's Northern University Press Imprint. It is notable for the breadth and diversity of themes covered, incorporating all aspects and periods of Italian literature, language, history, culture, politics, art and media, as well as studies which take an interdisciplinary approach and are methodologically innovative. The series welcomes books written in English and in Italian. The Italian Perspectives series is edited by two established scholars in the field of Italian studies, supported by an international Advisory Board.