Media Reviews
'This brilliant beast of a book has serious designs on your attention. Beautifully written, it has all the page-turning tension of a giallo, Italian detective fiction, but the pages turn slowly since the argument is carefully plotted and highly qualified ... In writing this ultimate work of Dante criticism, Ascoli inevitably courts comparisons with the ultimate author, Dante himself. Such comparisons are, for the most part, skilfully deflected by nice touches of humor and by the rare citational generosity ... a magnificent book of a prize-winning kind. It attests to the singular intelligence and vigor of North American Dante studies.' David Wallace, Speculum
'Dante and the Making of a Modern Author is a brilliant work, comprehensive in scope, convincing in its conclusions, abounding in original insights, exhaustively researched, philologically rigorous, theoretically sophisticated. The volume is a permanent contribution to Dante scholarship, but it will command a wider audience; anyone interested in the medieval or modern idea of authorship will need to ponder this book. ... a superb book, whose learning and intelligence do justice to the author it treats.' Warren Ginsburg, Annali d'Italianistica
'It is Albert Russell Ascoli's great merit to give the most accurate and elaborate account of the notion of authorship that Dante modeled and produced for himself. Ascoli's book is the fruit of a long and laborious scrutiny ... and it is outstandingly erudite. Ascoli also has an excellent knowledge not only of the works of modern theoretical thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Mary Carruthers about literary authorship and authority, but also of the discursive figurations of auctores available at Dante's time.' Jan Soffner, H-Italy Reviews
'In three decades of teaching and writing about Dante, I do not recall a more meticulously researched study, at least in English, of the Florentine poet's total oeuvre ... Though wide-ranging in the Latin and Italian texts treated, this extended study nevertheless focuses tightly on the related but complicated medieval concepts of author (auctor or autore) and authority (auctoritas or autoritade) ... Ascoli never shies away from presenting conflicting views or divergent scholarly interpretations of key Dantean passages. He never tires of noting how 'complex' the issues are that he himself raises. He is not afraid to pose a question and then respond that 'there are plural answers' ... this book is definitely required reading for all earnest scholars of Dante's opera omnia.' Madison Sowell, Renaissance Quarterly
'Ascoli ... who has authored numerous books and articles on Dante, Machiavelli, and Ariosto, offers a magisterial treatment of Dante's evolving conception of author ... Thoroughly grounded in the primary and secondary literature, Ascoli's text is accessible even to the interested nonspecialist. An important contribution to Dante studies; highly recommended.' T. L. Cooksey, The Library Journal
Review of the hardback: '... innovative, brilliantly constructed work ... The result is a book that presents a new way of looking at poetic and political authority, and at art that can serve as establishment propaganda or as a revolutionary force. Summing up: essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.' M. E. DiPaolo, Alvernia College
Review of the hardback: 'Ascoli has produced a study that is narrow in its focus but very broad in its implications. It is the product of long rumination and the most serious of scholarship.' The Review of English Studies
Dante and the Making of a Modern Author is a major work of scholarship, the result of many years of reflection and research. Its subject - the poet's profound, shifting, and self-centred obsession with 'authority' - is certainly among the most vital in present-day Dante studies; and, for a long time to come, Ascoli's book will stand as the definitive analysis of the question. Fittingly, Ascoli has written the authoritative account of Dante's lifelong engagement with auctoritas. -Zygmunt Baranski, University of Cambridge
In the long history of Dante studies, this is the book that was missing: an intellectual and literary biography of Dante as the first modern, vernacular 'author' of the Western tradition. A new and original book, scholarly, rigorous, and fully engaged with both Dante's culture and our own, it combines depth with breadth and, while reconstructing the complex process through which Dante achieves his position as a supreme 'author,' builds its own enduring authority. - Lino Pertile, Harvard University
Ascoli (Italian studies, Univ. of California, Berkeley), who has authored numerous books and articles on Dante, Machiavelli, and Ariosto, offers a magisterial treatment of Dante's evolving conception of author...Thoroughly grounded in the primary and secondary literature, Ascoli's text is accessible even to the interested nonspecialist. An important contribution to Dante studies; highly recommended... -T.L. Cooksey, Library Journal
This innovative, brilliantly constructed work examines how Dante Aligheri self-consciously presented himself as an authoritative poet, theologian, literary critic, and canonical giant. Ascoli argues that Dante strove to control how others regarded him and interpreted his work, and he achieved this so effectively that generations of even the most skeptical readers have approached him a little too reverentially to be wholly objective in their criticism. Drawing on works by Hannah Arendt and Roland Barthes, Ascoli deconstructs and historicizes Dante's work, presenting a modern way of reading him that neither disregards the spirit of the Commedia nor causes it to be considered ahistorically...Summing Up: Essential. -M. E. DiPaolo, Alvernia College, Choice
In three decades of teaching and writing about Dante, I do not recall a more meticulously researched study, at least in English, of the Florentine poet's total oeuvre....Though wide-ranging in the Latin and Italian texts treated, this extended study nevertheless focuses tightly on the related but complicated medieval concepts of author (auctor or autore) and authority (auctoritas or autoritade).... Ascoli never shies away from presenting conflicting views or divergent scholarly interpretations of key Dantean passages. He never tires of noting how `complex' the issues are that he himself raises. He is not afraid to pose a question and then respond that `there are plural answers'...this book is definitely required reading for all earnest scholars of Dante's opera omnia. -Renaissance Quarterly
Ascoli has produced a study that is narrow in its focus but very broad in its implications. It is the product of long rumination and the most serious of scholarship. - The Review of English Studies
...outstandingly erudite. -H-Italy
The argument throughout is rigorous and persuasive, and the book is unquestionably a major contribution to our understanding of Dante's quest and the various paths that led to its fulfillment. Indeed, it mirrors that achievement inasmuch as Ascoli can fairly claim to be the first to have taken the full measure of Dante's ambitions as hemoves fromwork to work. `Paene neminem ante nos'' (Almost no one before us) could be the book's epigraph. -Modern Philology
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