{"product_id":"dante-s-nonlinear-exemplarity-9781049804941","title":"Dante's Nonlinear Exemplarity","description":"\u003cp\u003eExamples promise order: they clarify, they instruct, they normalize. Yet in Dante they often falter. \u003cem\u003eDante's Nonlinear Exemplarity\u003c\/em\u003e follows these moments of didactic failure, when the mediation between the universal and the particular breaks down and the most ordinary of rhetorical tools raises doubts about the truths it is meant to secure.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe book traces Dante's uses of examples across the major works of his maturity – \u003cem\u003eDe Vulgari Eloquentia, Banquet, Monarchia\u003c\/em\u003e, and \u003cem\u003eComedy\u003c\/em\u003e – through a single, revealing figure: Alexander the Great. One of only three historical characters to appear in all four texts, Alexander enters Dante's writing in exemplifications that begin conventionally, then veer off course. Read together, these moments form a through-line for Dante's evolving reflections on fame, wealth, power, pedagogy, and the instability of language itself.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eCombining philology, close reading, and cultural history, \u003cem\u003eDante's Nonlinear Exemplarity\u003c\/em\u003e starts from these unstable examples to open up alternative ways of reading the works in which they appear. Each time, form and function pull apart, forcing Dante's readers to supply coherence themselves and exposing the assumptions they bring to the text. What emerges is a poetics of uncertainty that unsettles standard views of medieval didacticism and reframes how Dante's major works – and exemplarity itself before Boccaccio – organize and sustain meaning.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003ePublication date:\u003c\/strong\u003e 20 October 2026\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003ePage count:\u003c\/strong\u003e 318\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/strong\u003e University of Toronto Press\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eFormat:\u003c\/strong\u003e Hardback\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/strong\u003e 9781049804941\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e","brand":"Ambrogio Camozzi Pistoja","offers":[{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":68062674649338,"sku":"9781049804941","price":89.29,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0522\/4297\/2845\/files\/9781049804941.jpg?v=1793667831","url":"https:\/\/shulphink.com\/products\/dante-s-nonlinear-exemplarity-9781049804941","provider":"Shulph Ink","version":"1.0","type":"link"}