Aristotle's Poetics
- Book Review,
by Francis Fergusson (Introduction), S. H. Butcher (Translator)
Amazon.com
The original, Aristotle's short study of storytelling, written in the fourth century B.C., is the world's first critical book about the laws of literature. Sure, it's 2400 years old, but Aristotle's discussions--Unity of Plot, Reversal of the Situation, Character--though written in the context of ancient Greek Tragedy, Comedy and Epic Poetry, still apply to our modern literary forms. The book is quite short, and Aristotle illuminates his points with clear examples, making the Poetics perfectly readable, the better to impress people at parties when you say, "Of course, as Aristotle says..."
From Library Journal
This useful book, an extended study of the Poetics , treats such subjects as Aristotle's general aesthetic views; mimesis; pity, fear, and katharsis; recognition, reversal, and hamartia; tragic misfortune; the nontragic genres; and the historical influence of the work. Aristotle emerges as holding a deeply cognitivist view of poetry and as rejecting the attempt to judge art primarily by external (e.g., moral, political) criteria; his call for the relative autonomy of art, however, neither commits him to an aestheticist view nor prevents him from attributing to art a significant moral dimension. Halliwell's attempts to keep Plato in close view and to keep the Poetics within the context of Aristotle's philosophy as a whole are illuminating. For academic collections. Richard Hogan, Philosophy Dept., Southeastern Massachusetts Univ., N. DartmouthCopyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"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
Review
"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
Book Description
Introduced by Francis Fergusson, the Poetics, written in the fourth century B.C., is still an essential study of the art of drama, indeed the most fundamental one we have. It has been used by both playwrights and theorists of many periods, and interpreted, in the course of its two thousand years of life, in various ways. The literature which has accumulated around it is, as Mr. Fergusson points out, "full of disputes so erudite that the nonspecialist can only look on in respectful silence." But the Poetics itself is still with us, in all its suggestiveness, for the modern reader to make use of in his turn and for his own purposes.
Francis Fergusson's lucid, informative, and entertaining Introduction will prove invaluable to anyone who wishes to understand and appreciate the Poetics. Using Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, as Aristotle did, to illustrate his analysis, Mr. Fergusson pints out that Aristotle did not lay down strict rules, as is often thought: "The Poetics," he says, "is much more like a cookbook than it is like a textbook of elementary engineering." Read in this way, it is an essential guide not only to Sophoclean tragedy, but to the work of so modern a playwright as Bertolt Brecht, who considered his own "epic drama" the first non-Aristotelian form.
Language Notes
Text: English, Greek (translation)
Card catalog description
In this, the fullest attempt in English at a sustained interpretation of Aristotle's Poetics this century, Stephen Halliwell demonstrates that the Poetics, despite its laconic brevity, contains a coherent statement of a challenging theory of poetic art, as well as hints towards a theory of mimetic art in general. He assesses this theory against the background of earlier Greek views on poetry and art, particularly Plato's; and goes further than many previous authors in setting Aristotle's ideas in the wider context of his philosophical system. The core of the book is a fresh appraisal of Aristotle's view of tragic drama, in which Halliwell contends that at the heart of the Poetics lies a philosophical urge to work out a secularized understanding of Greek tragedy.
About the Author
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.
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.
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