"Professor Tambling adds an original voice to the current surge of interest in what makes Dante's Paradiso uniquely intriguing, even in comparison to the Inferno and Purgatorio. He directly engages the question that haunts the poem: can authentic human hope sustain itself on its spacewalk through the material universe, even if it cannot foresee its end?" -- Francis J. Ambrosio , Georgetown University, USA This book argues that Paradiso - Dante's vision of Heaven - is not simply affirmative. It posits that Paradiso compensates for disappointment rather than fulfils hopes, and where it moves into joy and vision, this also rationalises the experience of exile and the failure of all Dante's political hopes. The book highlights and addresses a fundamental problem in reading Dante: the assumption that he writes as a Catholic Christian, which can be off-putting and induces an overly theological and partisan reading in some commentary. Accordingly, the study argues that Dante must be read now in a post-Christian modernity. It discusses Dante's Christianity fully, and takes its details as a source of wonder and beauty which need communicating to a modern reader. Yet, the study also argues that we must read for the alterity of Dante's world from ours.

Jeremy Tambling is Professor of English at SWPS Warsaw (University of Social Sciences and Humanities), Poland. Prior to this, he was Professor of Literature at Manchester University, UK, and Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. He has written widely on Dante, psychoanalysis, urban literary studies, and Victorian literature. Previous publications on Dante include Dante and Difference: Writing in the Commedia (1988), Dante: A Critical Reader (ed.1999), and Dante in Purgatory: States of Affect (2012).