A Divine Graphic Comedy

The Divine Comedy is one of the most famous and timeless narrative poems, being still translated into several languages and inspiring movie adaptations (from Pasolini to Greenaway), pop and rock music, advertisement videogames and graphic novels.The transformations the text has gone through through...

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Main Author: Elisa Fortunato
Format: Article
Language:deu
Published: Università degli Studi di Torino 2022-06-01
Series:CoSMO
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/COSMO/article/view/6505
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author Elisa Fortunato
author_facet Elisa Fortunato
author_sort Elisa Fortunato
collection DOAJ
description The Divine Comedy is one of the most famous and timeless narrative poems, being still translated into several languages and inspiring movie adaptations (from Pasolini to Greenaway), pop and rock music, advertisement videogames and graphic novels.The transformations the text has gone through throughout the years reveal several different interpretations of Dante’s work and of its meaning. This essay aims at tracing a history of Dante-based graphic novels in the Anglo-American tradition. Particular attention is devoted to Birk and Sanders’ Dante’s Inferno (2004) and to Seymour Chwast’s graphic novel, Dante’s Divine Comedy (2010), which is the only ‘translation’ into a poster design style. This paper also examines how the Divine Comedy changes migrating from its original context to the contexts that characterized the different adaptations and remediations, and from its original poem form to new genres. It argues that the graphic novel is the genre better able to give to a contemporary reader a new Dante’s Divine Comedy keeping intact the delicate balance between words and imagines (the long history of the Divine Comedy’s illustration testifies it: from Botticelli to Joshua Reynolds, from Gustave Doré, to William Blake until Guttuso, see Battaglia Ricci 2018). Between losses and compensations, the graphic novel establishes a dialogue with its reader on several levels, depending on the expertise of source work and stimulating the reading (or the re-reading) of the classic; in this way they could be considered a strategy of survival of the classic.
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spelling doaj.art-8f026021060d440b89bb9699f84f05122022-12-22T00:31:09ZdeuUniversità degli Studi di TorinoCoSMO2281-66582022-06-012010.13135/2281-6658/6505A Divine Graphic ComedyElisa Fortunato0Università di Bari The Divine Comedy is one of the most famous and timeless narrative poems, being still translated into several languages and inspiring movie adaptations (from Pasolini to Greenaway), pop and rock music, advertisement videogames and graphic novels.The transformations the text has gone through throughout the years reveal several different interpretations of Dante’s work and of its meaning. This essay aims at tracing a history of Dante-based graphic novels in the Anglo-American tradition. Particular attention is devoted to Birk and Sanders’ Dante’s Inferno (2004) and to Seymour Chwast’s graphic novel, Dante’s Divine Comedy (2010), which is the only ‘translation’ into a poster design style. This paper also examines how the Divine Comedy changes migrating from its original context to the contexts that characterized the different adaptations and remediations, and from its original poem form to new genres. It argues that the graphic novel is the genre better able to give to a contemporary reader a new Dante’s Divine Comedy keeping intact the delicate balance between words and imagines (the long history of the Divine Comedy’s illustration testifies it: from Botticelli to Joshua Reynolds, from Gustave Doré, to William Blake until Guttuso, see Battaglia Ricci 2018). Between losses and compensations, the graphic novel establishes a dialogue with its reader on several levels, depending on the expertise of source work and stimulating the reading (or the re-reading) of the classic; in this way they could be considered a strategy of survival of the classic. https://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/COSMO/article/view/6505DanteDivine ComedyAdaptation
spellingShingle Elisa Fortunato
A Divine Graphic Comedy
CoSMO
Dante
Divine Comedy
Adaptation
title A Divine Graphic Comedy
title_full A Divine Graphic Comedy
title_fullStr A Divine Graphic Comedy
title_full_unstemmed A Divine Graphic Comedy
title_short A Divine Graphic Comedy
title_sort divine graphic comedy
topic Dante
Divine Comedy
Adaptation
url https://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/COSMO/article/view/6505
work_keys_str_mv AT elisafortunato adivinegraphiccomedy
AT elisafortunato divinegraphiccomedy