Uneasy Orthodoxy: The Jesuits, the Risorgimento and the Contexts of Joyce’S First Readings Of Dante

Abstract

This article investigates the historical and cultural contexts of the literary relationship between James Joyce and Dante Alighieri, arguing that Joyce was fundamentally influenced by the poet’s late nineteenth-century reputation. The article pays particular attention to the influence of the Italian Risorgimento and the counter-appropriation and re-Catholicising of Dante. Within the context of this wider discourse it considers the role of the Jesuit Order in Joyce’s education, Joyce’s Dante tuition at University College Dublin, and the editions of Dante’s works which Joyce is known to have read. In doing so, the article challenges pre-conceived notions of Dante’s canonicity and the nature of Joyce’s relation to him, and ultimately demonstrates that Joyce received Dante as a complex, subversive and historically determined writer.