The Poetry of Dante's Paradiso

This book argues that Paradiso – Dante’s vision of Heaven – is not simply affirmative. It posits that  Paradiso  compensates for disappointment rather than fulfils hopes, and where it moves into joy and vision, this also rationalises the experience of exile and the failure of all Dante’s political hopes. The book highlights and addresses a fundamental problem in reading Dante: the assumption that he writes as a Catholic Christian, which can be off-putting and induces an overly the