Classical Literary Criticism

European literary criticism was pioneered in the ancient world, and this edition provides the principal Greek and Latin texts in translation, giving the reader a fair and intelligible view of ancient literary criticism and its development. Each passage is supplemented by a brief contextual introduction and a lucid general introduction provides an overview of classical thought on tragedy, comedy, poetry, and epic, as well as of the ideas of mimesis, the moral effect of poetry, emotion, and rhetoric.