“The Divine Comedy manages the hat trick of qualifying as Biblefic, Homerfic, and Virgilfic. Sure, it’s a monumentally well-crafted allegory of the soul’s approach to the divine and more or less invented a new form of poetry, but it’s also a self-insert fic in which Dante, fanboy extraordinaire, gets to write about himself meeting Virgil and Homer and all his other faves and have them all tell him how much they like him.”   —Constance Grady, “Hamlet, The Divine Comedy, and 3 other pieces of classic literature that are also fan fiction,” Vox, April 5, 2016 (retrieved on November 10, 2023)

(Contributed by Nhat Tran, Johns Hopkins University ’23)