Critically engaging the thought of Heidegger, Gadamer and others, this work contributes both to the criticism of Dante's "Divine Comedy", and to the theory of interpretation. It uses hermeneutical theory to provide a reading of the poem, focusing on Dante's address to the reader.

Preface Introduction: Truth and interpretation in the Divine Comedy 1: Historicity of Truth 2: Truth through Interpretation and the Hermeneutic of Faith 3: Interpretive Ontology: Dante and Heidegger Ch. 1: The Address to the Reader 1: The Ontological Import of the Address to the Reader 2: Reader's Address as Scene of the Production of Sense 3: Truth, Sendings, Being-Addressed: Deconstruction versus Hermeneutics or Dialogue with Derrida? 4: A Philological Debate: Auerbach and Spitzer 5: Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the Fiction of Philology Ch. 2: Dante's Hermeneutic Rite of Passage: Inferno IX 1: Blockage 2: Passage 3: Ambiguities 4: Appendix: Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and the Meaning of a Modern Understanding of Dante Ch. 3: The Temporality of Conversion 1: Interpretation as Ontological Repetition and Dante's Fatedness 2: Ecstatic and Repetitive Temporality 3: Phenomenology of Fear/Anxiety in Inferno I 4: Dantesque Allegory and the Act of Understanding Ch. 4: The Making of History 1: Relocating Truth: From Historical Sense to Reader's Historicity 2: Reality and Realism in Purgatorio X 3: Some History (and a Reopening) of the Question of the Truth of the Commedia Ch. 5: Resurrected Tradition and Revealed Truth 1: Dante's Statius 2: Hermeneutics, Historicity, and Suprahistorical Truth Recapitulatory Prospectus: A New Hermeneutic Horizon for Religious Revelation in Poetic Literature? Core Bibliography of Recurrently Cited Sources Index