Unearthing previously unseen manuscript and print evidence, the book redefines the notion of Dante’s reception by conducting the first material and book-historical inquiry into the formation and popularisation of the the critical and scholarly discourse on Dante in Victorian culture.

Introduction: What do we talk about when we talk about Dante’s reception?1 Reading Gladstone reading Dante: Marginal annotation as private commentary 2 Ephemeral Dante: Matthew Arnold’s criticism in Victorian periodicals 3 The critic and the scholar: Christina and Maria Francesca Rossetti’s Dante sisterhood4 ‘Everyman’s Dante’: Philip H. Wicksteed and Victorian mass readerships 5 Academic networks: Dante studies in Victorian BritainConclusion: From grande amore to lungo studio: rethinking the hermeneutic turn in reception historyBibliographyIndex

Dante beyond influence provides the first systematic inquiry into the formation of the British critical and scholarly discourse on Dante in the late nineteenth century (1865–1921). Overcoming the primacy of literary influence and intertextuality, it instead historicises and conceptualises the hermeneutic turn in British reception history as the product of major transformations in Victorian intellectual, social and publishing history. The volume unpacks the phenomenology of Victorian dantismo through the analysis of five case studies and the material examination of a newly discovered body of manuscript and print sources. Extending over a sixty-year-long period, the book retraces the sophistication of the Victorian modes of readerly and writerly engagement with Dantean textuality. It charts its outward expression as a public criticism circulating in prominent nineteenth-century periodicals and elucidates its wider popularisation (and commodification) through Victorian mass publishing. It ultimately brings forth the mechanism that led to the specialisation of the scholarly discourse and the academisation of Dante studies in traditional and extramural universities. Drawing on the new disciplines of book history and history of reading, the author provides unprecedented insight into the private intellectual life and public work of Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold and William E. Gladstone and introduces a significant cohort of Dante critics, scholars and learned societies hitherto passed unnoticed. As it recaptures a long-neglected moment in Dante’s reception history, this path-breaking book illuminates the wider socio-cultural and economic impact that the Victorian hermeneutic turn had in advancing women’s access to literary and scholarly professions, educational reform and discipline formation.

'Dante Beyond Influence breaks genuinely new ground by going well beyond the realm of creative appropriation into the wider dimension of interpretive criticism and academic scholarship. Its tightly focused archival research supports a number of the study's key concerns. The development of networks of Dante reception is one of the many suggestive topics explored, as is the reading, scholarly and divulgative work of previously underrated Victorian women dantiste.'Nicholas Havely, University of York'A seminal book for studies of the modern reception of Dante, standing out in the great landscape of the centennial publications for methodological accuracy, breadth of interest, and narrative and structural coherence. In other words, it is a genuinely indispensable book that cannot be missed in the library of Dante scholars and literary reception specialists.'Natale Vacalebre, Bibliotheca Dantesca: Journal of Dante Studies'Dante beyond Influence opens new perspectives on how nineteenth-century Britons responded to Dante and how diverse audiences for his work were developed through particular engagement with the materiality and technology of Dante study [...] taking us beyond the aristocratic manuscript collection of the eighteenth century to Dante study for the populace.'Alison Milbank, Speculum