A01=Andrew Ford
Against the Sophists
Against Timarchus
Agathon
Alcman
Allegory
Anthropomorphism
Antidosis
Antithesis
Aphorism
Aristophanes
Author_Andrew Ford
Banishing
Callicles
Category=DS
Critias
Critias (dialogue)
Critical theory
Criticism
Cultural critic
Cynicism (philosophy)
Cypria
Declamation
Demagogue
Democritus
Deprecation
Dialectic
Digression
Dissoi logoi
Epigram
Epithet
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Essay
Excursus
Genre
Gorgias
Historical criticism
Hoi polloi
Iambus (genre)
Irony
Isocrates
Litotes
Materialism
Mock-heroic
Moralia
New Criticism
Onomacritus
Parody
Phemius
Philosopher
Philosophy
Phocylides
Poetry
Polemic
Problematization
Pun
Pythagoreanism
Quibble (plot device)
Reductionism
Rhapsode
Rhetoric
Ridicule
Satire
Scientism
Simile
Sophist
Sophocles
Sortition
Supplication
The Philosopher
Theory of Forms
Tragedy
Verisimilitude
Xenophanes
Product details
- ISBN 9780691120256
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 08 Aug 2004
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
Andrew Ford is Professor of Classics at Princeton University. He is the author of "Homer: The Poetry of the Past" and of numerous articles on Greek literature and literary history.
