Overview

As well as producing one of the finest of all poetic traditions, ancient Greek culture produced a major tradition of poetic theory and criticism. Halliwell's volume offers a series of detailed and challenging interpretations of some of the defining authors and texts in the history of ancient Greek poetics: the Homeric epics, Aristophanes' Frogs, Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Poetics, Gorgias's Helen, Isocrates' treatises, Philodemus' On Poems, and Longinus' On the Sublime.The volume's fundamental concern is with how the Greeks conceptualized the experience of poetry and debated the values 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, Halliwell questions many orthodoxies and received opinions about the texts analysed. The resulting perspective casts new light on ways in which the 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. Readership: Scholars and students of Greek literature, Greek poetics, and literary theory and criticism.

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9780198707011

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Reviews

Review from previous edition [Halliwell] is the ideal close reader... This book represents criticism at its best... detailed, learned, and nuanced arguments... a pleasure to read. D. Konstan, Gnomon [a] deeply learned collection of essays ... a book so rich in innovative readings of Greek literary theory. Llewelyn Morgan, Times Literary Supplement [a] probing overview of the Greek critical tradition... add[s] complexity and nuance to longstanding concerns...a subtle and humane defense of poetry... Halliwell's arguments [are] closely reasoned, comprehensively informed, and clear. Andrew Ford, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews [p]rovides numerous insights... Halliwell's analyses are always intelligent, sharp and illuminating. R. Nunlist, CJ-Online Halliwell's project is a very successful one... critical, engaging, cogent... full of insights and interest... [it] offers new, sensitive and challenging interpretations of the most important texts in Greek poetics... H. H. Koning, Journal of Hellenic Studies ...thoughtful and often innovative approaches... I found his arguments persuasive and his scholarship very impressive... a consistently useful guide through the vast ocean of scholarship on this important area. S. Chambers, Journal of Classical Teachers [an] important new book... very rich and original... subtle, precise, and judicious in its boldness. P. Boitani, Il sole 24 [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. S. E. Goins, CHOICE

Author Information

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.

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