A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics

Front Cover
John Wiley & Sons, Jul 20, 2015 - Literary Criticism - 547 pages

The first of its kind, A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics presents a synoptic view of the arts, which crosses traditional boundaries and explores the aesthetic experience of the ancients across a range of media—oral, aural, visual, and literary.

  • Investigates the many ways in which the arts were experienced and conceptualized in the ancient world
  • Explores the aesthetic experience of the ancients across a range of media, treating literary, oral, aural, and visual arts together in a single volume
  • Presents an integrated perspective on the major themes of ancient aesthetics which challenges traditional demarcations
  • Raises questions about the similarities and differences between ancient and modern ways of thinking about the place of art in society
 

Contents

Notes on Contributors
8
Figures of the Poet in Greek Epic and Lyric
31
The Contexts and Experience of Poetry and Art in the Hellenistic World
47
Poetry Patronage and Roman Politics
68
Music and Dance in Greece and Rome
81
The Body Human and Divine in Greek Sculpture
94
Painting and Private Art Collections in Rome
109
Architecture and Society
128
Stylistic Landscapes
291
Conceptualizing the Visual Arts Michael Squire
307
aesthetic Issues
327
Fiction
341
Imagination
354
Unity Wholeness and Proportion
381
Poikilia
406
Wonder
422

reflecting on art
141
Poetic Inspiration
158
The Canons of Style
175
Sense and Sensation in Music
188
Dance and Aesthetic Perception
204
Greek Painting and the Challenge of Mimesis
218
Ways of Looking at Greek Vases
237
Perceiving Colors
262
Tragic Emotions
438
Laughter
455
Pleasure
472
Art and Morality
486
Art and Value
505
Index of Subjects
518
Copyright

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About the author (2015)

THE EDITORS

Pierre Destrée is Associate Researcher at the FNRS and Associate Professor at the University of Louvain, Belgium, where he teaches ancient philosophy. He is the author of a French translation of Aristotle's Poetics (2014) and editor of Plato and the Poets (with F.G. Herrmann, 2011), Plato and Myth: Studies on the Use and Status of Platonic Myths (with C. Collobert and F. Gonzalez, 2012), The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle's Politics (with M. Deslauriers, 2013), and What Is Up to Us? Causality and Responsibility in Ancient Philosophy (with R. Salles and M. Zingano, 2014).

Penelope Murray was Senior Lecturer and a founding member of the Department of Classics at the University of Warwick, UK, before retiring in 2008. She continues to work on early Greek poetry and poetics, on philosophical responses to Athenian song-culture, especially the views of Plato, and on ancient literary criticism. Her publications include Genius: The History of an Idea (Blackwell, 1989), Plato on Poetry (1996), Classical Literary Criticism (2000), and Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousike in the Classical Athenian City (edited with P. Wilson, 2004).

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