The origins of criticism
Subtitle: literary culture and poetic theory in classical Greece
By: Andrew Ford.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Princeton, N.J
Language: eng
Number of pages: 356
Subjects: Greek literature -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc.; Literature -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc.; Poetry -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc.; Criticism -- Greece -- History -- To 1500.; Literature -- Philosophy.; Philosophy, Ancient.; Rhetoric, Ancient.
Description: "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 preliteracy 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.".

"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."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [297]-330) and index.