Yun Lee Too offers a sustained reading of the social function of the body of texts we identify as 'ancient literary criticism' with major implications for how we understand this discourse and also modern criticism and literary theory. The author argues that when Greek and Roman authors discuss what and how to read in works, they are attempting to create and maintain the political community and its identity by regulating the languages available to it. Literary criticism is a process of discrimination between competing discourses, serving as a strategy by which certain forms of speech or writing may be pronounced legitimate at the expense of others. The volume traces ancient criticism from its origins in archaic Greek poetry through to the early Christian era. As well as reading the familiar texts of ancient criticism - Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Poetics, [Longinus] On the Sublime, amongst others - it shows how ancient law, history, and rhetoric participate in the critical process.

The works collected in this volume have profoundly shaped the history of criticism in the Western world: they created much of the terminology still in use today and formulated enduring questions about the nature and function of literature. In Ion, Plato examines the god-like power of poets to evoke feelings such as pleasure or fear, yet he went on to attack this manipulation of emotions and banished poets from his ideal Republic. Aristotle defends the value of art in his Poetics, and his analysis of tragedy has influenced generations of critics from the Renaissance onwards. In the Art of Poetry, Horace promotes a style of poetic craftsmanship rooted in wisdom, ethical insight and decorum, while Longinus' On the Sublime explores the nature of inspiration in poetry and prose.

This book provides students and scholars of classical literature with a practical guide to modern literary theory and criticism. Using a clear and concise approach, it navigates readers through various theoretical approaches, including Russian Formalism, structuralism, deconstruction, gender studies, and New Historicism. Applies theoretical approaches to examples from ancient literature Extensive bibliographies and index make it a valuable resource for scholars in the field

The Gospels continue to defy efforts to fix 'generic' boundaries for determining their meanings. This volume discloses new stirrings and sightings of broader, more heuristically promising literary, rhetorical, and cultural registers which intersect in ancient narrative . The contributors seek to build upon or vigorously critique current generic hypotheses (biography, history, tragedy); to introduce recent insights and developments in genre theory; to probe ancient reception of the Gospels as works of literature; and to illuminate the relations between the literary characteristics of the Gospels and methodological advances in narratology, social memory, intertextuality, and performance.

Explores a new area of ancient literary theory and criticism by examining how landscape and metaphor shape discussions of style.

By "literary criticism" we usually mean a self-conscious act involving the technical and aesthetic appraisal, by individuals, of autonomous works of art. Aristotle and Plato come to mind. The word "social" does not. Yet, as this book shows, it should--if, that is, we wish to understand where literary criticism as we think of it today came from. Andrew Ford offers a new understanding of the development of criticism, demonstrating that its roots stretch back long before the sophists to public commentary on the performance of songs and poems in the preliterary era of ancient Greece. He pinpoints when and how, later in the Greek tradition than is usually assumed, poetry was studied as a discipline with its own principles and methods. The Origins of Criticism complements the usual, history-of-ideas approach to the topic precisely by treating criticism as a social as well as a theoretical activity. With unprecedented and penetrating detail, Ford considers varying scholarly interpretations of the key texts discussed. Examining Greek discussions of poetry from the late sixth century B.C. through the rise of poetics in the late fourth, he asks when we first can recognize anything like the modern notions of literature as imaginative writing and of literary criticism as a special knowledge of such writing. Serving as a monumental preface to Aristotle's Poetics, this book allows readers to discern the emergence, within the manifold activities that might be called criticism, of the historically specific discourse on poetry that has shaped subsequent Western approaches to literature.

This volume provides, in translation, the principal texts of ancient literary criticism, including Aristotle's Poetics, Horace's Art of Poetry, Longinus' On Sublimity, Tacitus' Dialogues, and extracts from Plato and Plutarch.

The cultural battle known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns served as a sly cover for more deeply opposed views about the value of literature and the arts. One of the most public controversies of early modern Europe, the Quarrel has most often been depicted as pitting antiquarian conservatives against the insurgent critics of established authority. The Shock of the Ancient turns the canonical vision of those events on its head by demonstrating how the defenders of Greek literature—rather than clinging to an outmoded tradition—celebrated the radically different practices of the ancient world. At a time when the constraints of decorum and the politics of French absolutism quashed the expression of cultural differences, the ancient world presented a disturbing face of otherness. Larry F. Norman explores how the authoritative status of ancient Greek texts allowed them to justify literary depictions of the scandalous. The Shock of the Ancient surveys the diverse array of aesthetic models presented in these ancient works and considers how they both helped to undermine the rigid codes of neoclassicism and paved the way for the innovative philosophies of the Enlightenment. Broadly appealing to students of European literature, art history, and philosophy, this book is an important contribution to early modern literary and cultural debates.

Encountering an ancient text not only as a historical source but also as a literary artifact entails an important paradigm shift, which in recent years has taken place in classical and Oriental philology. Biblical scholars, Egyptologists, and classical philologists have been pioneers in supplementing traditional historical-critical exegesis with more-literary approaches. This has led to a wealth of new insights. While the methodological consequences of this shift have been discussed within each discipline, until recently there has not been an attempt to discuss its validity and methodology on an interdisciplinary level. In 2006, the Faculty of Bible and Biblical Interpretation at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien, Heidelberg, and the Faculty of Theology at the University of Heidelberg invited scholars from the U.S., Canada, the Netherlands, Israel, and Germany to examine these issues. Under the title “Literary Fiction and the Construction of Identity in Ancient Literatures: Options and Limits of Modern Literary Approaches in the Exegesis of Ancient Texts,” experts in Egyptology, classical philology, ancient Near Eastern studies, biblical studies, Jewish studies, literary studies, and comparative religion came together to present current research and debate open questions. At this conference, each representative (from a total of 23 different disciplines) dealt with literary theory in regard to his or her area of research. The present volume organizes 17 of the resulting essays along 5 thematic lines that show how similar issues are dealt with in different disciplines: (1) Thinking of Ancient Texts as Literature, (2) The Identity of Authors and Readers, (3) Fiction and Fact, (4) Rereading Biblical Poetry, and (5) Modeling the Future by Reconstructing the Past.