Dante for All Ages: The Divine Comedy in Visual Media

Martina Mattei
Comparative Literature
UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation examines visual adaptations of Dante’s Divine Comedy for children, teenage, and young adult audiences as cultural negotiation in an era shaped by visual media and accelerated attention. Drawing on adaptation theory, childhood studies, and Dante studies, the project challenges the assumption that visual or pedagogical reworkings of canonical literature necessarily entail simplification or loss. Instead, it argues that visual adaptations for young audiences function as ethically charged forms of cultural translation through which societies renegotiate how complex moral knowledge is transmitted across generations. Although children constitute a significant portion of cultural audiences, their role as readers and viewers has often remained marginal within humanistic inquiry, subordinated to adult norms of interpretation and value. By taking children’s literature and media seriously as sites of ethical and aesthetic production, this project reframes adaptation for young audiences as a practice of inclusion. The study places Italian, Anglophone, and Japanese visual adaptations in dialogue as the most sustained traditions of engagement with Dante in Western and Eastern contexts. Through a comparative analysis of violence, sexuality, and othering, the dissertation examines how visual strategies and narrative framing reshape Dante’s moral imagination, recalibrating empathy, judgment, and exclusion for young audiences.