Dante's "Commedia" and the Poetics of Christian Catabasis

This dissertation examines the literary theme of catabasis, or the journey into the land of the dead, in both its classical and later Christian forms, the origins of each of these period's catabatic textual productions, and the similarities and differences between the theme's presentation during the classical and Christian Late-Antique and medieval periods. I will also consider, in a close textual reading of several key passages, the attitude of Dante Alighieri's Commedia to each of the two types of catabatic narrative, the classical and later Christian, in an effort to assess the greater literary context of the early fourteenth century epic poem. I am interested mainly in the Commedia's thematic sources, its textual models, the authors that it seeks to emulate, and the literary traditions behind both its technical and thematic choices.