Abstract: Inferno XVII joins together many themes and motives and gives rise to new ones. Rather than being a transitional moment in Dante's journey, the canto, through its use of numerous and varied rhetorical figures, actually possesses strong poetic unity. Nor is the organization of its materials haphazard. Rather, it is constructed using a mortise technique, by which its parts balance each other in length so as to create suspenseful increments of fear, repulsion, and horror.
Abstract from the American Dante Bibliography 1988
Reproduced by courtesy of the Dante Society of America