Abstract:

Poetics before Modernity presents a fresh look at the history of literary theory from its ancient beginnings to 1700 CE. It does so by curating new, exploratory work from a team of twelve internationally renowned classicists, medievalists, and Renaissance scholars, into an innovative thematic and chronological structure. Each of our contributors combines granular local detail with the long view of continuity and change in poetic thought across this two-thousand year period. Moreover, the chapters are arranged into four thematic sections – ‘Style’, ‘Genre’, ‘Imagination’, and ‘Hermeneutics’, each a unifying category of premodern poetics – each of which itself traces the coherence of these ideas from their classical roots through medieval and Renaissance developments. These sections thus transport well-known concepts in the history of poetics into uncharted territories, just as they draw new and marginal sources into a long and established tradition. The result is a volume which redraws the map of premodern poetic thought across standard historical and disciplinary boundaries. Recovering traditions that stretch from the earliest papyrus remains of literary theorising in the Western tradition to inspired baroque meditations on the poetics of creation in seventeenth-century Spain, Poetics before Modernity treats this period for the first time as a coherent unit in the history of the subject, and posits both the essential continuity and the inventive range of more than two millennia of poetic thought in the West.