ABSTRACT
From hamburgers and hot sauces to perfumes and haute couture, the “Dante brand” has had a surprising staying power in the twenty-first-century globalized marketplace. In our contemporary media ecology, Hell is a franchise. What makes Dante’s Hell (or his Paradise, for that matter) so susceptible to this kind of market takeover? Employing the correlated notions of “spreadability” and “stickiness”, this chapter examines the marketability inherent in Dante’s works, considering both how and why they have been hijacked and co-opted by developers across a variety of media: in advertising, blogs, commercial products, and social media outlets. Ultimately, the paper argues that the Commedia’s desire for itself to become a “sticky” product is undone by its own intrinsic participatory mechanisms, leading to its limitless “spreadability” across a variety of platforms, particularly in the American market.
