Category: World Classics

The Divine Comedy (Italian: Divina Commedia) is a long Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed in 1320, a year before his death in 1321. It is widely considered to be the pre-eminent work in Italian literature and one of the greatest works of world literature. The poem’s imaginative vision of the afterlife is representative of the medieval world-view as it had developed in the Western Church by the 14th century. It helped establish the Tuscan language, in which it is written, as the standardized Italian language. It is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. The narrative takes as its literal subject the state of the soul after…

The Book of Job, or simply Job, is a book found in the Ketuvim (“Writings”) section of the Hebrew Bible and the first of the Poetic Books in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. The language of the Book of Job, combining post-Babylonian Hebrew and Aramaic influences, indicates it was composed during the Persian period (540-330 BCE), with the poet using Hebrew in a learned, literary manner. It addresses the problem of evil, providing a theodicy through the experiences of the eponymous protagonist. Job is a wealthy and God-fearing man with a comfortable life and a large family. God asks Satan (‘the adversary”) for his opinion of Job’s piety. When Satan states that Job…