Ancient Literary Criticism

Description

The volume makes widely available some important scholarship on the canonical texts of ancient rhetoric and poetics. While there are numerous studies of general trends in classical criticism, this collection offers direct discussions of primary sources, which provide a useful companion to the Russell and Winterbottom anthology, Ancient Literary Criticism. The volume contains a chronology, suggestions for further reading, a new translation of Bernays' 1857 essay on katharsis, and an important introductory chapter addressing the tension in ancient literary criticism between its place in the classical tradition and its role in contemporary endeavors to reconstruct ancient culture. 1. The value of ancient literary criticism 2. Poetic inspiration in early Greece 3. Homeric professors in the age of the sophists 4. A theory of imitation in Plato's 'Republic' 5. Plato and Aristotle on the denial of tragedy 6. Ethos and dianoia: 'character' and 'thought' in Aristotle's Poetics 7. Aristotle on the effect of tragedy 8. Literary criticism in the exegetical scholia to the Iliad: a sketch 9. Stoic readings of Homer 10. Epicurean poetics 11. Rhetoric and criticism 12. Theories of evaluation in the rhetorical works of Dionysius of Halicarnassus 13. Longinus: structure and unity 14. The structure of Plutarch's 'De audiendis poetis' 15. Ars poetica 16. Ovid on reading: reading Ovid. reception in Ovid 'Tristia' II 17. Reading and response in the 'Dialogues' 18. The Virgil commentary of Servius 19. Ancient literary genres - a mirage? 20. Criticism ancient and modern