Skip to Main Content

Mapping the Afterlife: From Homer to Dante

Online ISBN:
9780190670511
Print ISBN:
9780190670481
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Mapping the Afterlife: From Homer to Dante

Emma Gee
Emma Gee
Independent scholar
Find on
Published:
21 May 2020
Online ISBN:
9780190670511
Print ISBN:
9780190670481
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This book is a tour of afterlife landscapes from Homer to Dante. It argues that the topography of the afterlife in Greek and Roman tradition, and in Dante, reflects the state of “scientific” knowledge at the time of the various contexts in which we find it, and the landscape of the Other World is a way of exploring and assimilating the shape of this world. This book posits that there is a dominant spatial idiom in afterlife landscapes, which the author calls the “journey-vision paradigm.” By this she means the presence of two kinds of space in afterlife representations—the horizontal journey of the soul across the afterlife landscape, and a synoptic vision of the universe. This has, in studies of individual texts, often been characterized as an inconsistency or anomaly: many scholars have argued that the vision of the universe is out of place in the underworld landscape. However, when one looks across the entire tradition, one finds that afterlife landscapes, almost without exception, contain these two kinds of space in one form or another. The function of this double vision of space—the journey-vision paradigm—is an attempt to harmonize the underworld, as the landscape of the soul, with the “scientific” universe, and to understand humanity in terms of the cosmos, and vice versa.

Contents
Close
This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

Close

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

View Article Abstract & Purchase Options

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Close