La metafora in Dante: temi e tendenze della critica

The paper aims to provide a critical review of scholarly inquiries on Dante’s metaphors, in order to show how the various analyses are all connected with a certain interpretative strategy and with some crucial issues related to this latter. Since the predominant approach is based on content, I begin with introducing the foremost semantic categories developed by medieval and contemporary theories of metaphor. By means of analysing the main critical interpretations of Dante’s metaphors, I demonstrate that all of them, including those whose central focus is intended to be a linguistic one, end up with a fundamentally semantic approach, in dialogue with both rhetorics and, most recently, philosophy. Finally, I propose some hypotheses on the reasons why this topic has been relatively neglected, while also reframing it within a more general discourse on Dante’s figurative language.