Dante Alighieri - Inferno
TIME in Literature
Mirela Cristina Mardare
Annemarie Gabriella Schmidt
Who was Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri was born in 1265 in Florence,nowadays Italy and died facing execution in Florence for refusing to pay a fine, resulting from his political activities. In 1302, Dante wandered before settling in Ravenna, Italy. There he died in September 1321, shortly after finishing The Divine Comedy. Some speculate that he had caught malaria.
Dante wrote Inferno while in political exile from Florence, and he used it as a vehicle to express his political beliefs and take comfort in imagining bad endings for his enemies. However, the poem's main purpose is, to quote Milton, to "justify the ways of God to Men."
Quick summary
Dante finds himself lost in the dark woods of a forest, because he lost the way of the righteous path. An old friend of Dante’s, Virgil, guides Dante all the way through the nine circles of Hell. There, he finds sinners of greed, anger, violence and more. He talks to some of the lost souls, finding some of his own old friends in the circles.
Virgil and Dante depart from Hell, letting the second part of the Divine Comedy, Purgatory, begin.
Time represented in Inferno
Dante presents time in his book by expressing his thoughts on what the afterlife would look like. The infinity of time in Inferno and of the torture of the damned souls shows how a period of time could affect the rest of someone’s life. The short years lived on Earth affect the souls in the Afterlife, just as how our actions in present time can affect us in the future.
Time impacts the souls in Inferno, by showing them how important it is to live your life as a righteous spirit, not a sinful one. The sinners belong in infinite torture because of their careless actions throughout their lifetime.
Time is presented as our own prison, our own torture. Dante keeps that feeling throughout Inferno, making the readers feel empathy for the sinners, even though they should not.
The impact of Inferno in modern literature
Dante's vision of the Afterlife in The Divine Comedy influenced the Renaissance, the Reformation and helped give us the modern world, writes Christian Blauvelt.
Dante helped to raise the Tuscan dialect into the national literary language of Italy. He established vernacular languages as literary languages and demonstrated that great writers did not have to use Latin, and this was perhaps his greatest contribution to the Renaissance.
Dante's depictions of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory have greatly and extensively inspired Western art. Artists of all faiths and creeds have reiterated and reinterpreted the Divine Comedy (composed in the early 1300s) to address contemporary politics, philosophy, society, and artistic principles.
The impact of Inferno in modern literature
It is usually held to be one of the world's great works of literature. Divided into three major sections—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—the narrative traces the journey of Dante from darkness and error to the revelation of the divine light, culminating in the Beatific Vision of God.
Gallery
Statue of Dante Alighieri in Florence
Drawing by Gustave Dore of Dante in the gloomy woods
Bibliography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighieri