Research Focus Group Talk: Between Justice and Horror: The Theological Violence of Dante’s Inferno Recast

This talk explores how modern adaptations of Dante’s Divine Comedy for young readers reshape the poem’s theology of violence. In Inferno, punishment reflects divine justice and the consequences of disordered love; in contemporary picturebooks, illustrated editions, and comics, this moral framework is often softened, secularized, or inverted. Through examples from Italy, the United States, and Japan, the talk shows how artists translate Dante’s violence into abstraction, irony, or spectacle, transforming divine retribution into aesthetic or emotional experience. These adaptations reveal how cultures negotiate what kinds of violence (and what kinds of justice) can be shown to children, turning Dante’s Hell into a mirror of modern moral and pedagogical anxieties.

Martina Mattei is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on adaptation theory, children’s literature, and the transnational reception of canonical texts. Her dissertation examines contemporary adaptations of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy for children across English-, Italian-, and Japanese-language traditions. Through a comparative analysis of picturebooks, comics, videogames, and animation, she explores how these texts negotiate the poem’s theological, moral, and philosophical complexity for young audiences, revealing local pedagogical and cultural investments. Martina’s work engages broader questions about how canonical texts are transformed when reframed for new readerships, particularly in visual and age-specific media. She is especially interested in the way themes such as violence, race, and spirituality are omitted, softened, or reimagined in global childhood adaptations of Dante, and how these editorial choices reflect shifting notions of literary value, ethical storytelling, and cultural authority.

Zoom attendance link here

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group