Dante - HELL PURGATORY PARADISE - 1882 DORÉ DECORATIVE

OR,

HELL, PURGATORY, & PARADISE

OF

DANTE ALIGHIERI

TRANSLATED BY

THE REV. HENRY FRANCIS CARY, A.M.

WITH THE LIFE OF DANTE, CHRONOLOGICAL VIEW OF HIS AGE,

ADDITIONAL NOTES, ETC.

FROM THE LAST CORRECTED LONDON EDITION;

WITH THE

TRANSLATOR'S LATEST CORRECTIONS

AND ADDITIONS.

FRONTISPIECE BY

GUSTAVE DORÉ

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New York: Arundel Printing and Publishing Co. No Date given, but no later than 1882.

12mo. 7½ x 4¾ inches (19 x 12 cm).

600; (4 [ads]) pages. Complete.

 

Bound in the publisher's green cloth; ornate Gothic borders with Oak and Acanthus leaf designs stamped in black on front cover and spine. Title bordered in gold on spine, with further decoration. Frontispiece by Gustave Doré, with tissue-guard present and in very good condition. Two leaves (4 pages) of ads bound in back.

In very good antiquarian condition. Light wear to spine ends and moderate scuffs along the fore and bottom extremities of front and rear covers. Name and date on front free endpaper of "H. M. Putnam/1882." Binding is strong, with no loose or missing pages, and the pages and frontispiece are clean with no markings.

   A scarce & elegant edition of this Classic, with a wonderful shelf presence.

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Click on a picture to enlarge it!

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The Divine Comedy describes Dante's journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso), guided first by the Roman poet Virgil and then by Beatrice, the subject of his love and of another of his works, La Vita Nuova. While the vision of Hell, the Inferno, is vivid for modern readers, the theological niceties presented in the other books require a certain amount of patience and knowledge to appreciate. Purgatorio, the most lyrical and human of the three, also has the most poets in it; Paradiso, the most heavily theological, has the most beautiful and ecstatic mystic passages in which Dante tries to describe what he confesses he is unable to convey (e.g., when Dante looks into the face of God: "all'alta fantasia qui mancò possa" - "at this high moment, ability failed my capacity to describe," Paradiso, XXXIII, 142).

Dante wrote the Comedy in a new language he called "Italian", based on the regional dialect of Tuscany, with some elements of Latin and of the other regional dialects. By creating a poem of epic structure and philosophic purpose, he established that the Italian language was suitable for the highest sort of expression. In French, Italian is nicknamed la langue de Dante. Publishing in the vernacular language marked Dante as one of the first (among others such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio) to break from standards of publishing in only Latin (the languages of liturgy, history, and scholarship in general). This break allowed more literature to be published for a wider audience - setting the stage for greater levels of literacy in the future.

Readers often cannot understand how such a serious work may be called a "comedy". In Dante's time, all serious scholarly works were written in Latin (a tradition that would persist for several hundred years more, until the waning years of the Enlightenment) and works written in any other language were assumed to be more trivial in nature. Furthermore, the word "comedy," in the classical sense, refers to works which reflect belief in an ordered universe, in which events not only tended towards a happy or "amusing" ending, but an ending influenced by a Providential will that orders all things to an ultimate good. By this meaning of the word, as Dante himself wrote in a letter to Cangrande I della Scala, the progression of the pilgrimage from Hell to Paradise is the paradigmatic expression of comedy, since the work begins with the pilgrim's moral confusion and ends with the vision of God.

-From Wikipedia.

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