Comic Culture

Abstract

The comic pervaded the culture around Dante, offering him a model of literature that he explored throughout his life. For centuries, medieval literary theorists had defined literature as a subset of ethics, with tragic literature communicating the praise of the virtuous, and comic literature conveying the blame of the sinful. The definitions of comic and satiric literatures overlapped such that the two genres could not be fully distinguished from each other. Comic elements appear throughout Dante’s literature, from his lyric poems to the derision of the Italian dialects in De vulgari eloquentia. Nowhere is the influence of comic literature clearer than when dealing with his masterpiece, the Commedia. From the invectives in Inferno to the tirades against ecclesiastical corruption in Paradiso, the author of the Commedia is committed to decrying the flaws of the sinful.