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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of Their Texts

Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of Their Texts

Struck, Peter

Paperback

Literary CriticismAncient History General

ISBN10: 0691162263
ISBN13: 9780691162263
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: Mar 10 2014
Pages: 312
Weight: 1.13
Height: 0.74 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

Nearly all of us have studied poetry and been taught to look for the symbolic as well as literal meaning of the text. Is this the way the ancients saw poetry? In Birth of the Symbol, Peter Struck explores the ancient Greek literary critics and theorists who invented the idea of the poetic symbol.

The book notes that Aristotle and his followers did not discuss the use of poetic symbolism. Rather, a different group of Greek thinkers--the allegorists--were the first to develop the notion. Struck extensively revisits the work of the great allegorists, which has been underappreciated. He links their interest in symbolism to the importance of divination and magic in ancient times, and he demonstrates how important symbolism became when they thought about religion and philosophy. They see the whole of great poetic language as deeply figurative, he writes, with the potential always, even in the most mundane details, to be freighted with hidden messages.


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