Ancient Literary Criticism

Andrew Laird is Reader in Classical Literature, Warwick University.

• 1. The value of ancient literary criticism ; 2. Poetic inspiration in early Greece ; 3. Homeric professors in the age of the sophists ; 4. A theory of imitation in Plato's 'Republic' ; 5. Plato and Aristotle on the denial of tragedy ; 6. Ethos and dianoia: 'character' and 'thought' in Aristotle's Poetics ; 7. Aristotle on the effect of tragedy ; 8. Literary criticism in the exegetical scholia to the Iliad: a sketch ; 9. Stoic readings of Homer ; 10. Epicurean poetics ; 11. Rhetoric and criticism ; 12. Theories of evaluation in the rhetorical works of Dionysius of Halicarnassus ; 13. Longinus: structure and unity ; 14. The structure of Plutarch's 'De audiendis poetis' ; 15. Ars poetica ; 16. Ovid on reading: reading Ovid. reception in Ovid 'Tristia' II ; 17. Reading and response in the 'Dialogues' ; 18. The Virgil commentary of Servius ; 19. Ancient literary genres - a mirage? ; 20. Criticism ancient and modern

Andrew Laird has succeeded in selecting a canon that gives an instructive and stimulating overview of the history of ancient criticism.