VITA NUOVA FEDERICO FELLINI: HIS LIFE AND WORK BY TULLIO KEZICH, TRANSLATED BY MINNA PROCTOR NEW YORK: FABER AND FABER. 444 PAGES. $35. Will Federico Fellini's films ever seem as magical again as they did in the '60s and '70s? This was the...

Besides offering an accurate, admirably readable Italian text and facing English translation of Dante's Vita Nuova, this new volume makes bold claims about Dante's text. It does so in more than 240 pages of introduction, topical index, glossary and concordance, appendices on textual...

Menocal argues in this excerpt that the Vita Nuova's real subject is Dante's search for a viable poetry and that he ultimately succeeds when he adopts an absolute literalness.

In this essay, Shaw, repudiating the generally accepted view that the Vita Nuova is an allegory, proposes an interpretation based on a literal reading of the historical events recounted in the narrative.

In the following excerpt, Singleton examines the relationship between the Vita Nuova and Provençal love poetry, discerning that Dante's use of medieval mysticism in his book's conception of love distinguishes it from the Proven, cal tradition.