The rhetoric of romantic Dantism: a study of Dante's role in the stylistic development of European romanticism in France, England and Italy

Abstract

Erich Auerbach anticipated that 'the interpretation of individual portions of the Commedia from its earliest commentators to the sixteenth century, and then again since Romanticism' would yield 'an accurate type of Geistesgeschichte'. My dissertation, over three instances of Dante's Romantic reception, traces a significant moment in the spiritual history of Europe. Tacitus's Dialogus and Pseudo-Longinus's On the Sublime suggest eloquence is only possible when people are free, but that freedom is bought at the price of discord and insecurity. Liberty and eloquence had been possible, briefly, during the French Revolutionary years and Napoleonic Wars. I examine the relationship between Romantic Dantism and the conservatism that accompanied the European Restoration. The failure of Revolutionary hopes and Napoleon's downfall explain the prevalence of a trope of declining eloquence that pervades Dantism of the period. Romantic writers' subversion of neoclassical ideas of genre and diction coincides with a valorization of Dante's pluristylistic, generically unique Commedia – Dante became a model of past eloquence and lost freedom. Consequently, stylistic experimentation frequently hinges on Dante, expressing political allegiance and philosophical conviction. I link Romantic styles with ideology (following Carlo Dionisotti, who identifies 'cristiani e miscredenti, reazionari e liberali, neoguelfi e neoghibellini'), examining Chateaubriand and Mme de Staël, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Ugo Foscolo: all are representatives of different political-aesthetic camps. Chateaubriand and Mme de Staël refer to Dante in the context of their championing of, respectively, Catholic legitimist and liberal progressive politics; Shelley's engagement with Dante instances an ascetic withdrawal from active political wrangling; Foscolo's late Dante criticism demonstrates his cultivation of a highly individualistic, neo-ghibelline 'political Protestantism'. The Commedia's appeal to all these parties arises from its various stylistic modes: its aristocratic severity, its pathos, its use of allegory and hermeticism, and its unrelenting acerbity, economy of expression, and alta serietà.