Read more
This volume's fundamental concern is with how the Greeks conceptualized the experience of poetry and debated the values of that experience. Halliwell offers a series of detailed and challenging interpretations of some of the most defining authors, such as Homer, Plato, and Aristotle, and texts in the history of ancient Greek poetics.
List of contents
- Preface
- Note to the reader
- 1: Setting the Scene: Questions of Poetic Value in Greek Culture
- 2: Is there a Poetics in Homer?
- 3: Aristophanes' Frogs and the Failure of Criticism
- 4: To Banish or not to Banish? Plato's Unanswered Question about Poetry
- 5: Aristotle and the Experience of Tragic Emotion
- 6: Poetry in the Light of Prose: Gorgias, Isocrates, Philodemus
- 7: The Mind's Infinity: Longinus and the Psychology of the Sublime
- Bibliography
- Index locorum
- Index of Greek Terms
- General Index
About the author
Stephen Halliwell is Professor of Greek at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. He taught previously at the universities of Oxford, London, Cambridge, and Birmingham, and has held visiting professorships in Belgium, Canada, Italy, and the USA. He has published extensively on Greek literature, philosophy, and culture, as well as on the influence of Greek texts in the later history of ideas. His last two books both won international prizes: Greek Laughter: A Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity was awarded the Criticos Prize for 2008; The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (2002) won the Premio Europeo d'Estetica in 2008, and has been translated into Italian.
Summary
This volume's fundamental concern is with how the Greeks conceptualized the experience of poetry and debated the values of that experience. Halliwell offers a series of detailed and challenging interpretations of some of the most defining authors, such as Homer, Plato, and Aristotle, and texts in the history of ancient Greek poetics.
Additional text
a]n engaging study of the interplay between Greek views of poetry as a source of ecstasy and as a medium for truth and human values.
