A Girls’ Night Out with Dante and Virgil: Transforming the Divine Comedy in the Age of Fandom

Since at least the time of Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes stories, every product of popular culture has had its fans (short for “fanatics”). Since at least the time of Star Trek’s first season, communities of fans (or fandoms, from “fan” + “kingdom”) have been reimagining the characters and stories they love through such practices as fan fiction and fan art, among many others. Because fandoms are usually associated with contemporary pop culture phenomena, it may come as a surprise to learn about the existence of a vast network of fans and fan activities revolving around none other than Dante and his Divine Comedy.

There is, of course, a long tradition of popular culture and media engaging with the Comedy and its creator through literature, film, the visual arts, comics, games, commercial brands, and more. So much so that the reception of Dante in popular culture has developed into a research field in itself within the wider domain of Dante studies. What is striking, however, about the Dante fandom – or, at least, what struck me enough to write about it in this book – is that it invites us to rethink Dante’s poem in radically original ways.

So what has the red-hatted Florentine got to do with online fandom?

There seem to be at least two sides to this question.

On the one hand, narratives that re-imagine the Comedy, its world, and its characters can be found on every major fan fiction online repository, from fanfiction.net to Wattpad through Archive of Our Own. They differ wildly in tone, style, and genre, from prose to poetry, from tragedy to comedy, from melodrama to pornography, from epic adventures in the Underworld to intimate love stories – particularly between Dante and Virgil. One of the most popular Comedy-themed fan fictions on Archive of Our Own imagines the adventures of the characters from the Harry Potter saga as they traverse the circles of Dante’s Hell. Another text casts Dante and Virgil as an ordinary couple falling asleep on the couch. Yet another narrates in tercets (!) a sexual encounter between Dante and Virgil on the shore at the base of Mount Purgatory. Circulating online is also a profusion of Comedy-related fan art and illustrations, hosted on platforms like Pinterest, DeviantArt, and tumblr. The latter, in particular, is home to a flourishing Dante-inspired fandom, whose activities range from humorous posts (fig. 1) to webcomics like those by the user binary-bird (fig. 2), who also created a series of illustrations entitled nel mezzo – a little trip through Dante’s Inferno.

On the other hand, the Comedy itself is re-interpreted – in both playful and serious tones – as a work of fan fiction. In October 2014, R.E. Parrish posted a comic on his tumblr blog (fig. 3) in which Dante is depicted as a dreamy fan fiction author who has fallen in love with Virgil. In April 2016, Vox published an article entitled Hamlet, The Divine Comedy, and 3 other pieces of classic literature that are also fan fiction. A month later, The Divine Comedy ranked n. 2 in the article 11 Classics That Are Secretly Fanfiction on Bustle magazine. Between September and October 2021, a post on Tapas Forums entitled Why can’t we call Dante’s Inferno a fanfiction [sic] developed into a 6,000-word debate.

The unfolding of the Comedy’s reception in the world of fandom could thus be summarized through the dichotomy “Dante’s poem and fan fiction” vs. “Dante’s poem as fan fiction”.

Dante’s fandom may very well be the community in which the most radical, playfully irreverent, and wildly creative transformations of Dante and the Comedy are currently taking place. The exploration of this intermedial realm requires interdisciplinary methods blending Dante studies, popular culture studies, and digital ethnography.

We have just begun to scratch the surface.