From the very start of Inferno, Dante is thrust into a world of endless pain and suffering, watching the souls forever trapped in the consequences of their sins. Specifically, Dante uses landscape and weather phenomena of each circle as his tools...

While physical life is transient, the notion of the immortality of the soul is central to Christianity. Before Dante wrote the Divine Comedy, the residence of the soul’s afterlife was speculative and enigmatic. Dante filled this vacuum by creating...

To the heedless reader, Dante’s Inferno and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales are generally interpreted as mere works of fiction designed and created for the sole purpose of entertainment. To fully glean the authors’ intended message, though, one...

Symbolism in literary works is used when one thing is meant to represent something else, in order to create meaning and emotion. In the first part of Dante Alighieri's three-part epic poem entitled Divine Comedy, there are many symbols the author...