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If all the writing that claimed to ‘subvert’ our expectations actually did so, society would have long since learned to live without expectations. The word has become a staple of book reviews and jacket blurbs, a foundation for how undergraduates understand the value of a text, and an aspiration for writers hoping to establish a reputation for colouring outside the lines. This commercial and institutional ubiquity is made stranger by the fact that, except in rare discussions of theological corruption, this very old word has become associated with literature only in the past 70 years. In 1956, the Canadian critic Hugh Kenner became the first to deploy it as a literary-critical term in an essay in The Sewanee Review: he claimed that the Irish poet W B Yeats had ‘subverted’ a tradition. Kenner was using the word in the sense it had since its entry into English via the Wycliffe Bible: to raze, to destroy, to overthrow, or to corrupt.

The fourth in that list is crucial: ‘to corrupt’ hints at the distinction between subversion and revolution. We might call a revolution an inversion of the social order that happens only once Hierarchy No 1 has been weakened enough that Hierarchy No 2 can come into power. It would be impossible for a revolution to be both successful and secret. Subversion, on the other hand, affiliates success with secrecy. Subversion is effective precisely because it takes a keen perception to point it out: it implies corruption so subtle that it eludes notice, even when you think you’re looking.

The idea that Yeats subverted a tradition, though, still implies that traditions are susceptible to wholesale destruction, one that may begin obliquely but end in the rise of a completely new tradition. But literary traditions are not so brittle as that. The unique power of literary tradition, unlike philosophy or science, is that literature can respond to its predecessors without invalidating them, can contradict them without competing with them. When we call literature ‘subversive’, we don’t mean it in the destructive sense that it was used until Kenner. Literary subversion is a radically different phenomenon, in which predecessors are incorporated into their own repudiation.

Many constellations of literary work show the nature of literary subversion, but for a clear and etymologically appropriate example, look to depictions of the Christian Hell. Hell is a good place to talk about subversion because it’s such a uniquely literary place: it is perhaps the only location that appears in a wide swathe of literary traditions but never appears (to the living) outside of fiction. It’s easy to get bogged down in the sometimes productive, sometimes distracting differences between James Joyce’s Dublin and the Dublin that existed in 1904, or in the ways that Shakespeare’s plays interact with the geography of Italy. In comparison, discussing depictions of Hell is a cakewalk. Theologians, the reigning authorities on Hell, prefer to describe it as a position of infinite distance from the Divine. Not discounting the horror of that concept, it leaves quite a bit of room for competing literary depictions to serially subvert one another without being harassed by the pesky reality of the physical world.

Dante Alighieri’s Inferno responds to the classical epics in what is perhaps the most famous literary Hell, taking readers into the Christian realm of eternal punishment in the same way that Homer and Virgil took readers into Greco-Roman Hades. Despite the Christian theology that informs the project as a whole, the poem retains many features of its predecessors. Dante shares the page with Virgil himself, employs the three-headed Cerberus as a watchdog in the Third Circle and, in perhaps the most surprising among a gamut of other debts, shows sinners punished in a manner corresponding to their crime. The individuality of Dante’s Hell is still difficult to grasp: for example, not only are those who were buffeted by desire in life condemned to an eternal hurricane in death, but Hell itself is organised along Dante’s own priorities. His sympathy for lovers, like Paolo and Francesca, puts them in the early, less severe regions of Hell, while his disgust with political connivance, like the machinations of Guelph factions that determined the course of his own life, puts intriguers near the centre of the Pit.

Literary influence and political commentary are not at all disconnected concerns

Dante is subversive today because the idiosyncrasy of his Hell still comes across to contemporary readers. If the Inferno had actually subverted, in the sense of ‘destroyed’ or ‘corrupted’, the ideas of Hell that came before it, readers today would have no stake in Dante’s innovations. Our ideas of Hell would have been replaced entirely with........

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