Inferno Revealed: From Dante to Dan Brown
“A lively sprint through Dante's celebrated poem and its stupendous afterlife. The authors roll out their account as a mystery story of their own. It's a terrific tale from start to finish about how Dante's seven-hundred-year-old personal epic still grips twenty-first-century readers, writers, and creative luminaries.” --William J. Kennedy, Professor of Comparative Literature, Cornell University "Deborah and Mark Parker provide a lively, witty, and intelligent guide to Dante's own masterwork, theInferno, and then to 'Dante after Dante,' as it were.  They take readers on an interesting tour of how Dante used as a springboard for creative re-use, culminating in Dan Brown, who has captured the imagination of many readers and, importantly, led them back to Dante's medieval masterpiece."  —Christopher S. Celenza, Director, American Academy in Rome, and Charles Homer Haskins Professor, Johns Hopkins University “Deborah and Mark Parker bridge the gap between hard core Dante scholars and the pop cultural world. From Dante to Dan Brown is a cultural leap as well as a leap through time and across the planet. Deborah and Mark Parker have made the leap less daunting and treacherous." --Sandow Birk, artist, film maker, and author of the illustrated Dante’sInferno “In a prose that is arresting because it is so lucid and direct, Deborah and Mark Parker have written a book that explains the magic of Dante’s famous Inferno. Their discussions of Beetlejuice, Se7en, and Sandow Birk’s illustrated Inferno are especially fine, as is their assessment of Dan Brown’s recent best-seller, which climaxes their book.  What they write of Dante might well be adapted and applied to their own book: ‘Part of Dante’s genius lies in his extraordinary ability to reduce a complex situation to gestures that are still understandable today.’”--Jerome McGann, The John Stewart Bryan University Professor, University of Virginia"This rich, lively account of Dante's poem, written with gusto and rigor, is a must especially for the fans of Dan Brown'sInferno. With great precision the study by Deborah and Mark Parker makes sharply visible the radical, objective difference that exists between Brown's representation of the technological utopia for the happy few of the modern world in the making and Dante's generous, poetic vision of beauty and light in theDivine Comedy." —Giuseppe Mazzotta, Sterling Professor of Italian, Yale University, and former president of the Dante Society of America