Dante and Beatrice and Dante through Beatrice: The Journey(s) of an Author

<p>In this dissertation, “Dante and Beatrice and Dante through Beatrice: The Journey(s) of an Author,” I reconstruct the history of Dante’s decades-long literary career through the character of Beatrice. I investigate Dante’s literary and intellectual trajectory from a Beatrice-centered perspective. I identify four stages of Dante’s literary evolution, which I treat in four chapters. In the first chapter, I go back to the origin of the dynamic Dante-Beatrice relationship by looking at the figure of Beatrice in Dante’s youthful literary production. After defining the methodological boundaries for this study and recognizing a four-poem “micro-canone beatriciano” (<i>Lo doloroso amor</i>, <i>E m’incresce di me</i>, <i>Deh pellegrini</i>, and <i>Oltra la spera</i>), I show that this grouping of <i>rime giovanili</i> provides scholars with a unique vantage point to assess the first decades of Dante’s pre-<i>Vita nova</i> writing. The second chapter focuses on the five-year period 1292-1296 during which the book of the <i>Vita nova</i> was likely composed. Building on the scholarship of leading Dantisti who have recently promoted a reconsideration of the differences between the <i>Vita nova</i>’s prose and poetry, I argue that there are two Beatrices in the <i>libello</i>, two irreconcilable figures that from the beginning to the end of the book coexist side-by-side: the “Beatrice of the poems” and the “Beatrice of the prose.” By investigating the discrepancies between these two figures, I demonstrate that the leap between the Beatrices of the <i>libello</i> mirrors the great divide that, in turn, separates the “Dante of the poems” from the “Dante of the prose.” The third chapter explores the Dante-Beatrice literary relationship in the works Dante wrote between the first half of the 1290s to circa 1307/08. Beatrice’s marginal presence in the works dating to this time period is a deliberate choice on Dante’s part, who seems to be more than willing to openly distance both his persona and his literary production from the shadow of Beatrice. A close analysis of Dante’s sonnet exchanges with Cino and book 2 of the <i>Convivio</i> confirms this assessment, for it illuminates a Dante who appears primarily interested in either minimizing or dismissing any association with the “gentilissima."</p>