La Dea Diana di Heinrich Heine. Sopravvivenza e rinascita di un mito nella Parigi del XIX secolo.

This dissertation offers the first comprehensive study of the Goddess Diana in Heinrich Heine’s writings, framing her as the pivotal figure in his long-term “mythographic project,” Die Götter im Exil (1830-1855). Far more than a modern makeover of the classical huntress, Diana embodies a complex, multivalent idea that suffuses Heine’s psycho-anthropological vision of paganism and Hellenism. She appears as a goddess in exile, a Warburgian symbol of the "Nachleben der Antike". The dissertation is organized into three sections. The first, historical and artistic in focus, traces the “metamorphoses” of the Diana myth across religious, iconographic, and literary history from antiquity to the nineteenth century. The second, theoretical-methodological section examines Heine’s approach to myth, situating his distinctive treatment of mythic material within modern literature. Particularly, the aim is to analyse Heines’s theory of the myth and the symbolism of Diana in accordance with his philosophical perspective on nature, pantheism and sansimonism. The third section analyses the numerous rewritings of the Diana myth that appear throughout Heine’s oeuvre. The literary corpus includes historical-philosophical essays (Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland; Elementargeister), lyrics (Diana; In der Frühe; Nächtliche Fahrt; Symbolik des Unsinns), a poem (Atta Troll) and ballets (Die Göttin Diana; Doktor Faust).