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This book is significant for its insistence on a return to Dante's works and world--at the expense of approaches that deflect, psychologize, and anachronistically theorize. Took (emer., University College London, UK) offers an intellectual history of the poet and his world that clarifies and brings immediacy to both. Emphasizing cultural awareness rather than cultural materialism, Took identifies Dante's "commitment to the being and becoming of the otherwise anxious subject, of this or that individual or group of individuals concerned in respect of their properly human presence in the world as creatures of reasonable self-determination" (p. xxi). Took faithfully traces this throughout Dante's biography and works, creating patterns of insight that reveal a mind in action, as it comes to understand, create, and react. In the Commedia, for instance, it is a question of "encountering self in its power to self-annihilation (Hell), of fashioning self afresh in point of properly human knowing and loving (Purgatory), and of rejoicing at last in the now properly speaking transcendent substance of it all (Paradise)" (p. xxii). This book is an important resource for understanding not only the full scope of Dante's work and life (including his life after exile) but also the cultural history of Florence in the 13th century.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

It is perhaps a mark of how far removed from original contexts literary critics have wandered that this book needed to be written. But one should be grateful that Corbett (Univ. of St Andrews, Scotland) did write it. The refreshing aim of this remembering of Dante's Commedia is to remind the reader that the spiritual, moral, and ethical concerns of medieval literature were real and related directly to a robust, coherent Christian tradition available to readers in the day and to today's readers. As Corbett writes in the introduction, "Dante presents his eschatological imagination as at the service of a very immediate practical purpose: the salvation of souls in the here and now." Whereas other critics emphasize that Dante's primary purpose was to produce an innovative picture of the afterworld, or to write a Christian epic to rival those of the ancients, Corbett argues that "Dante's imaginative vision and poetic genius" were geared first toward the need to "transform people's moral lives and to reform the institutions that governed them" (p. 2). A key focus are the vices of pride, sloth, and avarice, and how they play out in the three terraces of Purgatory devoted to them.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

In this unique study, Myers (Iowa State Univ.) looks at national identity and the relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic from a literary persepctive. She seeks to "reposition Haiti on the literary map of the Dominican Republic ... challenging the physical space of the border and its history of blurred lines" (p. 2). In addition to analyzing Dominican authors, Myers evaluates works by Dominican American, Haitian American, and Latinx authors, to show how their varied texts envision a third space, neither Haitian nor Dominican, alluding to the interdependent and interethnic nature of identity. In the introduction Myers provides the theoretical framework, including Gloria Anzaldua's border theory, Michel Foucault's heterotopia, and Homi Bhabha's third space. Chapter 1 explores Dominican works written during the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, a period of marked anti-Haitian sentiment, and chapter 2 delves into post-Trujillo literature, with a focus on Dominican writer Marcio Veloz Maggiolo. The remaining two chapters examine works by Dominican Americans, Haitian Americans, and a Puerto Rican author to illustrate the various literary representations of the physical and metaphorical Haitian Dominican border. Diasporic texts exemplify Dominican, Haitian, and Latinx peoples' shared experiences back home and within the US immigrant community. This is a vital contribution to Caribbean studies.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

This is the most comprehensive, and arguably the most definitive, bilingual collection to date of the work of French poet Paul Verlaine (1844-96). Including 192 poems, this incomparable volume opens with introductory remarks by Valazza (Indiana Univ.), followed by Rosenberg's comments on his approaches to translation. Rather than hew to precise word-to-word translations, with the added difficulty of retaining original rhyming patterns, Rosenberg (also Indiana Univ.) offers expansive translations without sacrificing the emotion or musicality of the original verse. The result is a masterful, spirited representation in English translation of Verlaine's impact on modernist poetry. Several of the poems appear in English for the first time. To help readers fully appreciate the evolution of the poet's genius, Valazza presents the poems in chronological order of publication, and for each poem he provides an informative annotation that elaborates on the poem's publication history. Providing a judicious selection of Verlaine's poetic corpus, the volume concludes with brief bibliographical references; an index of titles and first list lines increases accessibility to the volume and thus to Verlaine.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

"Caution: reading fiction endangers physical and mental health in adolescent males." This warning, similar to those on cigarette packages today, would have been appropriate on books in France during the final decades of the 19th century. According to Proulx (Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), the turn to the "pathologization" of reading came with France's humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Deep national concerns over military inadequacy and civic weakness made itself known in a proliferation of explanations, among them the perception that literature played a troubling role in the formation of France's male citizens. Fin de siecle coming-of-age novels came to be seen as stunting "normal" growth because they diverted young men from productive real-life activity and led them into a paralyzing disenchantment with reality. Proulx examines expressed anxieties about reading in fictional works, polemical essays, and medical treatises from 1880 to 1914 and anxieties merely suggested, hidden, even denied. He then shows how Andre Gide and Marcel Proust rejected the link between literature and illness, paradoxically proposing their own novels as potential cures for society's ills. This gave rise to a new "queer pact" between writers and readers, reversing fin de siecle discourses about the book and its perils. Proulx's study is intelligent, timely, and groundbreaking.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.