Der christliche Metacode im Spätrealismus

Why is Dante’s Divine Comedy, summa of the Middle Ages and a Catholic–Christian epic of salvation, still relevant in a literary system that sees itself as completely secularised? This study shows how the authors of late German realism focus on the fragmentary appropriation of Dante’s work and the secular response to it. The recourse to Dante advances towards playing with scholastic utopias and becomes a meta code of a self-consuming bourgeois society. With simultaneous references to extra-literary systems of knowledge, this book exposes the unbroken productivity of Dante’s Christian representations of space and the poetic–realist retelling of life’s transgressive wanderings through the three realms beyond our own.