Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 61-05, Section: A, page: 1867.

Director: Giuseppe Mazzotta.

This dissertation argues that the rebirth of interest in the Commedia in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Europe altered the landscape of the contemporary autobiographical genre. Following a theoretical discussion of the shift from Enlightenment to Romantic modes of literary self-representation, Chapter One explores how Dante's writings, by offering one of the most sustained and complete notions of personal identity in medieval European literature, anticipated how they would be later debated. Chapter Two begins with Voltaire's infamous rejection of Dante in 1756 ("Nobody reads Dante anymore") and demonstrates that Enlightenment indifference to Dante reflected a much larger intellectual development: the hostility of the philosophes to the introspective, personal, and transcendental narrative that reached its heights in the Commedia. Chapters Three to Five trace respectively how this question of Dante stimulated intense debate in and around the autobiographical writings of Vittorio Alfieri, William Wordsworth, and Ugo Foscolo.

Centered on the Commedia's reception, this study explores how the shift in the relationship between aesthetic experience and the construction of personal identity between 1750 and 1825 influenced the evolution of the autobiographical genre in Europe. As aesthetic response became less disinterested and more laden with experiential value, the models of personal identity in literary texts shaped how writers constructed their histories of the self. Dante figured prominently in this process of self-representation: Romantic theorists sensed that he exemplified what Hegel described as the "world-historical individual," or the heroic actor who understood intuitively that he was internalizing epochal change on the most personal level. Romantics thus bracketed the Christian and communal aspects of the Commedia in order to integrate with their own autobiographical works the model of poet-as-hero that the persona "Dante" came to embody. By showing that Dante represented for many writers the beginning of their own "Romantic" (A. W. Schlegel), "modern" (Shelley), and "heroic" (Alfieri) historical development this dissertation hopes to deepen our knowledge of how aesthetic experience molds the formation of identity.