This book studies several of Mark Helprin’s novels in terms of their relation to Dante’s Divine Comedy. The authors demonstrate that A Soldier of the Great War, In Sunlight and in Shadow, and Winter’s Tale substantially correspond to, respectively, Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. The author himself has acknowledged his debt to Dante and references to the Comedy appear throughout his works. It is not that Helprin’s novels track their Dantean antecedents slavishly, or even follow the structure of the Canticles explicitly. Rather, the central arguments of Dante’s three works are taken up by Helprin in his novels. In adopting Dante’s essentially Platonic doctrine of mediation, Helprin’s characters are fully instantiated human beings who also mediate and reveal the divine. In his engagement with Dante, Helprin affirms the core philosophical, theological and psychological arguments of the Comedy, and then modifies those arguments in a distinctly modern way. Specifically, Helprin focuses on human freedom as the necessary precondition for justice to exist, both for individuals and for societies. In the final chapter of the book, the authors turn to Helprin’s Freddy and Fredericka. In this novel, Helprin both assumes Dante’s argument, and then radically alters it, by pointing to the possibility of a just regime on earth, rather than one that exists merely in heaven. While accepting much of Dante’s metaphysical argument, Helprin shows the virtues of liberal democracy as that form of political regime that is most able to unite human eros with eternal principles. In the end, Helprin’s novels are remarkable for the way in which they advocate for ancient virtues, while insisting upon the distinctly modern liberal account of human freedom as the necessary foundation for human flourishing.

For seven seasons, AMC’s Mad Men captivated audiences with the story of Don Draper, an advertising executive whose personal and professional successes and failures took viewers on a roller coaster ride through America’s tumultuous 1960s. More than just a television show about one of advertising’s “bad boys,” the series investigates the principles of the American regime, exploring whether or not the American Dream is a sustainable vision of human flourishing and happiness. This collection of essays investigates the show’s engagement with the philosophic and political foundations of American democracy.

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This is a retelling in prose of Dante's "Divine Comedy." It includes his Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. In the "Divine Comedy," Dante journeys through the three parts of the afterlife.

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