Aristotle's Poetics

by Aristotle

Overview

Aristotle's Poetics is best known for its definition and analysis of tragedy and comedy, but it also applies to truth and beauty as they are manifested in the other arts. In our age, when the natural and social sciences have dominated the quest for truth, it is helpful to consider why Aristotle claimed: "poetry is more philosophical and more significant than history." Like so many other works by Aristotle, the Poetics has dominated the way we have thought about all forms of dramatic performance in Europe and America ever since. The essence of poetry lies in its ability to transcend the particulars of everyday experience and articulate universals, not merely what has happened but what might happen and what ought to happen. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9788726627411
Publisher:	Saga Egmont International
Publication date:	07/30/2020
Sold by:	De Marque
Format:	eBook
Pages:	34
File size:	173 KB

About the Author

Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many different subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology.

Translator and scholar S. H. Butcher served as editor for the Dover Thift Edition of the Poetics, as well as for the Orationes, Volume 1 by Demosthenes. Butcher is also the author of Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art.

Other works by the renowned classical scholar, translator, and literary critic Francis Fergusson include The Idea of a Theater: A Study of Ten Plays, Sallies of the Mind: Essays, Trope and Allegory: Themes Common to Dante and Shakespeare, and Dante's Drama of the Mind: A Modern Reading of the Purgatorio.

Table of Contents

Introduction to 1988 edition
Abbreviations
I. The Setting of the Poetics
II. Aristotle's Aesthetics 1: Art and its Pleasure
III. Aristotle's Aesthetics 2: Craft, Nature and Unity in Art
IV. Mimesis
V. Action and Character
VI. Tragedy and the Emotions
VII. Fallibility & Misfortune: The Securlarisation of the Tragic
VIII. The Chorus of Tragedy
IX. Epic, Comedy and Other Genres
X. Influence & Status: the Nachleben of the Poetics
App. 1 The Date of the Poetics
App. 2 The Poetics and Plato
App. 3 Drama in the Theatre: Aristotle on Spectacle (opsis)
App. 4 Aristotle on Language (lexis)
App. 5 Interpretations of katharsis
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Pivoting on the argument that at its heart lies a philosophical urge to work out a secularized understanding of Greek tragedy, Halliwell (Greek, U. of St. Andrews, Scotland) offers a sustained interpretation of the . He assumes no knowledge of Greek. The 1986 edition published by Gerald Duckworth and Company is here reprinted with a new introduction. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknew.com)

Booknews

A work which must become essential reading no only for all serious students of the Poetics, including those who, like [this] reviewer, have dabbled in it from time to time, but also for those (the great majority) who have prudenty fought shy of it altogether.
— Classical Review

B. R. Rees

A work which must become essential reading not only for all serious students of the Poetics . . . but also for those (the great majority) who have prudenty fought shy of it altogether.” —B. R. Rees, Classical Review

From the Publisher