Dante's Inferno: difficulty and dead poetry

Abstract

1. Action and order: Cantos 2. History, nature and philosophy: Cantos 3 Narrative, myth and the individual: Cantos xii-xvi 4. Comedy and identity: Cantos xvii-xxiii 5. Signs in transition and the pathos of order: Cantos xxiv-xxvii 6. Endings, tragic and comic: Cantos xxviii-xxxiii 7. Conclusion: dead poetry: Inferno xxxiii and the Vita nuova.