Dante in the context of "Renaissance"

Literary fiction—also called serious fiction, high literature, artistic literature, or sometimes just literature, encompasses fiction that is more character-driven than plot-driven, examines the human condition, or is considered serious art by critics. These labels are typically used in contrast to genre fiction, which refers to books that fit into established categories of the book trade and place more value on entertainment and appealing to a mass audience. Literary fiction can also be called non-genre fiction and is often considered to have more artistic merit than popular genre fiction.

Some categories of literary fiction, such as historical fiction, magic realism, autobiographical novels, and encyclopedic novels, are frequently called genres without being considered genre fiction. Some authors are seen as writing literary equivalents or precursors to established genres while still maintaining the division between commercial and literary fiction. Examples include the literary romance of Jane Austen and the speculative fiction of Margaret Atwood. Some critics and genre authors have argued for even greater overlap between literary and commercial fiction, noting that major literary figures have used elements of popular genres—such as science fiction, crime fiction, and romance—to create works of literature. The slipstream genre is sometimes described as falling between the genre fiction and non-genre fiction.

Comedy is a genre of dramatic performance having a light or humorous tone that depicts amusing incidents and in which the characters ultimately triumph over adversity. For ancient Greeks and Romans, a comedy was a stage-play with a happy ending. In the Middle Ages, the term expanded to include narrative poems with happy endings and a lighter tone. In this sense Dante used the term in the title of his poem, the Divine Comedy (Italian: Divina Commedia).

The phenomena connected with laughter and that which provokes it have been carefully investigated by psychologists. The predominating characteristics are incongruity or contrast in the object, and shock or emotional seizure on the part of the subject. It has also been held that the feeling of superiority is an essential factor: thus Thomas Hobbes speaks of laughter as a "sudden glory." Modern investigators have paid much attention to the origin both of laughter and of smiling, as well as the development of the "play instinct" and its emotional expression.

Exile or banishment is primarily penal expulsion from one's native country, and secondarily expatriation or prolonged absence from one's homeland under either the compulsion of circumstance or the rigors of some high purpose. Usually persons and peoples suffer exile, but sometimes social entities like institutions (e.g. the papacy or a government) are forced from their homeland.

In Roman law, exsilium denoted both voluntary exile and banishment as a capital punishment alternative to death. Deportation was forced exile, and entailed the lifelong loss of citizenship and property. Relegation was a milder form of deportation, which preserved the subject's citizenship and property.

Adamantios Korais or Koraïs (Greek: Ἀδαμάντιος Κοραῆς [aðaˈmandi.os koraˈis]; Latin: Adamantius Coraes; French: Adamance Coray; 27 April 1748 – 6 April 1833) was a Greek scholar credited with laying the foundations of modern Greek literature and a major figure in the Greek Enlightenment. His activities paved the way for the Greek War of Independence and the emergence of a purified form of the Greek language, known as Katharevousa. Encyclopædia Britannica asserts that "his influence on the modern Greek language and culture has been compared to that of Dante on Italian and Martin Luther on German".

Purgatorio (Italian: [purɡaˈtɔːrjo]; Italian for "Purgatory") is the second part of Dante's Divine Comedy, following the Inferno and preceding the Paradiso; it was written in the early 14th century. It is an allegorical telling of the climb of Dante up the Mount of Purgatory, guided by the Roman poet Virgil—except for the last four cantos, at which point Beatrice takes over as Dante's guide. Allegorically, Purgatorio represents the penitent Christian life. In describing the climb Dante discusses the nature of sin, examples of vice and virtue, as well as moral issues in politics and in the Church. The poem posits the theory that all sins arise from love—either perverted love directed towards others' harm, or deficient love, or the disordered or excessive love of good things.

The Western classical tradition is the reception of classical Greco-Roman antiquity by later cultures, especially the post-classical West, involving texts, imagery, objects, ideas, institutions, monuments, architecture, cultural artifacts, rituals, practices, and sayings. Philosophy, political thought, and mythology are three major examples of how classical culture survives and continues to have influence. The West is one of a number of world cultures regarded as having a classical tradition, including the Indian, Chinese, and Islamic traditions.

The study of the classical tradition differs from classical philology, which seeks to recover "the meanings that ancient texts had in their original contexts." It examines both later efforts to uncover the realities of the Greco-Roman world and "creative misunderstandings" that reinterpret ancient values, ideas and aesthetic models for contemporary use. The classicist and translator Charles Martindale has defined the reception of classical antiquity as "a two-way process ... in which the present and the past are in dialogue with each other."

The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry is a 1973 book by Harold Bloom on the anxiety of influence in writing poetry. It was the first in a series of books that advanced a new "revisionary" or antithetical approach to literary criticism. Bloom's central thesis is that poets are hindered in their creative process by the ambiguous relationship they necessarily maintain with precursor poets. While admitting the influence of extraliterary experience on every poet, he argues that "the poet in a poet" is inspired to write by reading another poet's poetry and will tend to produce work that is in danger of being derivative of existing poetry, and, therefore, weak. Because poets historically emphasize an original poetic vision in order to guarantee their survival into posterity, the influence of precursor poets inspires a sense of anxiety in living poets. Thus Bloom attempts to work out the process by which the small minority of 'strong' poets manage to create original work in spite of the pressure of influence. Such an agon (a vain attempt by a writer to resolve the conflict between his ideas and those of a much more influential predecessor), Bloom argues, depends on six revisionary ratios, which reflect Freudian and quasi-Freudian defense mechanisms, as well as the tropes of classical rhetoric.

Before writing this book, Bloom spent a decade studying the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century. This is reflected in the emphasis given to those poets and their struggle with the influence of John Milton, Robert Burns, and Edmund Spenser. Other poets analyzed range from Lucretius and Dante to Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery. In The Anxiety of Influence and other early books, Bloom claimed that influence was particularly important for post-enlightenment poets. Conversely, he suggested that influence might have been less of a problem for such poets as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Bloom later changed his mind, and the most recent editions of The Anxiety of Influence include a preface claiming that Shakespeare was troubled early in his career by the influence of Christopher Marlowe. The book itself is divided into six major categories, called "six revisionary ratios" by Bloom. They are clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis, and apophrades.