Horace on the Role of the Poetry’s Audience in the Literary Process

Chrysanthe Tsitsiou-Chelidoni

doi:10.1515/tc-2013-0018

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Horace on the Role of the Poetry’s Audience in the Literary Process

Chrysanthe Tsitsiou-Chelidoni

Published/Copyright: December 1, 2013

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From the journal Trends in Classics Volume 5 Issue 2

Abstract: According to the main thesis of this article, Horace sees the literary process as the result of a communicative act between the poet and his audience. In the preferences of the recipients of literature, he recognises a source of the birth, establishment and evolution of a poetic form. He also thematises the way in which the reception of a literary work affects under concrete socio-political structures – typified in powerful persons such as poets, critics or the princeps – the fortune of the work itself, as well as the survival of its poetic/generic form. Besides, he offers his readership the opportunity to recognise illuminating affinities between the development of language and the way in which different literary forms arise; thus, the role of the audience in literary history becomes clearer. These conclusions are projected into a larger literary context in the last part of the article.

: Horace; audience; reception; genre; usus (loquendi/legendi); rhetoric; literary criticism

Published Online: 2013-12-01

Published in Print: 2013-12-01

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https://doi.org/10.1515/tc-2013-0018