Between ecstasy and truth : interpretations of Greek poetics from Homer to Longinus /
This book offers a series of detailed, challenging interpretations of some of the most important texts in the history of ancient Greek poetics: the Homeric epics, Aristophanes' Frogs, Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Poetics, Gorgias' Helen, Isocrates' treatises, Philodemus...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Language Notes: | English. |
| Published: |
Oxford ; New York :
Oxford University Press,
2012.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | This book offers a series of detailed, challenging interpretations of some of the most important texts in the history of ancient Greek poetics: the Homeric epics, Aristophanes' Frogs, Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Poetics, Gorgias' Helen, Isocrates' treatises, Philodemus' On Poems, and Longinus, On the Sublime. Its fundamental concern is with how the Greeks conceptualized the experience of poetry and debated the value of that experience. The book's organizing theme is a recurrent Greek dialectic between ideas of poetry as, on the one hand, a powerfully enthralling experience in its own right (a kind of ‘ecstasy') and, on the other, a medium for the expression of truths which can exercise lasting influence on its audiences' views of the world. Citing a wide range of modern scholarship, and making frequent connections with later periods of literary theory and aesthetics, the book questions many orthodoxies and received opinions about the texts it analyses. The resulting perspective casts new light on ways in which Greeks attempted to make sense of the psychology of poetic experience—including the roles of emotion, ethics, imagination, and knowledge—in the life of their culture. This also shows that we ourselves still have much to learn from re-engaging with those attempts. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xii, 419 pages) |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 368-399) and indexes. |
| ISBN: | 0191612413 9780191612411 9780191738753 0191738751 0198707010 9780198707011 1283426617 9781283426619 9786613426611 661342661X |