The Poetry of Dante's Paradiso

“Professor Tambling adds an original voice to the current surge of interest in what

makes Dante’s Paradiso uniquely intriguing, even in comparison to the Inferno

and Purgatorio. He directly engages the question that haunts the poem: can

authentic human hope sustain itself on its spacewalk through the material

universe, even if it cannot foresee its end?”

—Francis J. Ambrosio, Georgetown University, USA

This book argues that Paradiso – Dante’s vision of Heaven – is not simply

affirmative. It posits that Paradiso compensates for disappointment rather than


fulfils hopes, and where it moves into joy and vision, this also rationalises the


experience of exile and the failure of all Dante’s political hopes. The book

highlights and addresses a fundamental problem in reading Dante: the assumption

that he writes as a Catholic Christian, which can be off-putting and induces an

overly theological and partisan reading in some commentary. Accordingly, the

study argues that Dante must be read now in a post-Christian modernity. It

discusses Dante’s Christianity fully, and takes its details as a source of wonder

and beauty which need communicating to a modern reader. Yet, the study also

argues that we must read for the alterity of Dante’s world from ours.

Jeremy Tambling is Professor of English at SWPS Warsaw (University of Social

Sciences and Humanities), Poland. Prior to this, he was Professor of Literature at

Manchester University, UK, and Professor of Comparative Literature, University of

Hong Kong, Hong Kong. He has written widely on Dante, psychoanalysis, urban

literary studies, and Victorian literature. Previous publications on Dante

include Dante and Difference: Writing in the Commedia (1988), Dante: A Critical

Reader (ed.1999), and Dante in Purgatory: States of Affect (2012).