Introductory papers on Dante

"This volume of essays on Dante by Dr Dorothy L. Sayers will be eagerly sought by the many thousands of readers who already know her vigorous and vivid translation of the Inferno. As those who have heard Miss Sayers' lectures on Dante can testify, she brings to the interpretation of the Divine Comedy a vitalizing power of analysis and re-creation. Readers of Dante often become discouraged by the mass of factual detail which the older school of historical criticism has made available; mere aestheticism, however, unrelated to time and space, is not likely to satisfy them either. They will find in Miss Sayers' essays enough scholarly assistance to put themselves in the position of a contemporary reader; but their attention will chiefly be drawn to the relevance of the Divine Comedy to our present world and way of life. Miss Sayers' emphasis on the ethical, rather than on the aesthetic, or historical, significance of Dante's work, comes as a welcome and bracing challenge to the confusion regarding values, whether of literature or of life, which characterizes the present age" --Dust jacket.