Aristotle's Poetics is perhaps the most important ancient text on literary theory; he develops and justifies the term 'poetry' for the first time, defines tragedy and epic in particular as genres and provides criteria for assessing the quality of poetry.
The text of the Poetics has been intensively analysed and interpreted since the beginning of modern philology: Considerable progress has been made in researching the textual form and the individual sections, some of which are difficult to understand, particularly in recent times: The transmission has been newly clarified through the re-evaluation of an important manuscript (B) and the Arabic translation, and significant new suggestions for understanding central passages and concepts are available.
This book aims to present this by means of a newly constituted text, a close translation and a philological commentary. In an appendix, sections that are relevant for the reconstruction of the lost part of the Poetics are presented and commented on in two languages.