The twenty-five original essays in this ... book constitute both a ... survey of Dante scholarship and a detailed manifesto for ... understanding of one of the world's great poets ... The essays ... confront a range of important questions: What theories, methods, and issues are unique to Dante scholarship? How are they changing? What approaches constitute the distinctive American tradition in Dante studies, and how has this body of critical understanding taken shape? Why - and how - do we read Dante in today's global, postmodern culture? From John Ahern on the first copies of the Commedia to Peter Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff on Dante after modernism, the essays shed ... light on Dante's texts, his world, and what teachers, scholars, poets, and other readers in a wide variety of cultures and contexts make of his ... legacy.-Back cover.