What is the importance of poetry? Why do we enjoy the experience of tragic distress? Does Roman tragedy reflect Aristotelian poetics? In what ways can Aristotle's "Poetics" be read and interpreted? To what kind of use can it be put? Such are the questions discussed in this collection of essays, which examines one of the most seminal as well as cryptic texts of Western criticism - a text that still triggers essential deliberations about literature and the ways in which we relate to it.

This book sets out to disentangle the complex chronology of early Greek epic poetry, which includes Homer, Hesiod, hymns and catalogues. The preserved corpus of these texts is characterized by a rather uniform language and many recurring themes, thus making the establishment of chronological priorities a difficult task. The editors have brought together scholars working on these texts from both a linguistic and a literary perspective to address the problem. Some contributions offer statistical analysis of the linguistic material or linguistic analysis of subgenres within epic, others use a...