David Robey lectured in Italian at Oxford University before becoming Professor of Italian at Manchester and then Reading Universitties. He has published on 15th-century Italian humanism, language and style in Dante and Renaissance narrative poetry, the computer analysis of literature, and modern critical theory. He is the author of a computer-based study on Sound and Structure in Dante's 'Divine Comedy' (OUP, 2000), and an extensive data resource on Sound and Metre in Italian Narrative Verse. Peter Hainsworth and David Robey co-edited the Oxford Companion to Italian Literature (2002), and were joint authors of Italian Literature: A Very Short Introduction (2012).
The authors are much to be praised for not allowing the brevity of their volume to undermine or unjustly foreclose what Dante's text leaves to his reader'a judgement and sensibilities. * Fortean Times, Heather Webb * Swift-moving, decisive, sensitive and suggestive * The Manchester Review * The authors are much to be praised for not allowing the brevity of their volume to overdetermine or unjustly foreclose what Dante's text leaves to his reader's judgement and sensibilties. * Heather Webb, The Times Literary Supplement * There is something almost uncanny about how this book makes the work of a long-dead poet from another culture come alive... this book imparts knowledge as well as encouraging us to find it ourselves. * Guardian, Nicholas Lezard * this work deftly explores aspects of Dante that were variously enlightened * Independent, Christopher Hirst *