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Comment by tlholaday | Hacker News Reader

> people have been doing literary criticism forever.

Do you have any examples? I'm recollecting Augustine, Aquinas, Boethius, Abelard, Plotinus, Maimonides, et al, and nothing like Poetics comes to mind. What am I not remembering?

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Not the commenter you responded to, but Northrup Frye at the very least tried to take a systematic approach to literary theory, using Aristotle as a model. I would like to peek into the parallel universe in which his approach in the Anatomy of Criticism (1957) became as widely adopted as, e.g. deconstructionism.

Yes, many instances of modern literary criticism come to mind, such as Ben Jonson's commentary on the works of Shakespeare, his friend, producer, and cast member; Cervantes' analysis embedded in Quixote and Sheridan's analysis embedded in Tristram Shandy; Tolstoy's What Is Art; etc.

My impression remains that during the period between Poetics and, oh, Canterbury Tales, the great thinkers didn't publish anything about Narrative.

Thanks for the Northrop Frye tip!

None to add to that, though I was more thinking (as another child post) of poets and thinkers who were clearly self-referentially aware of what they were doing and what was going on generally with literary narrative (Swift and Coleridge come to mind).

Edit: oh that child post was you :). Yeah there was for sure a gaping lacuna before Chaucer, and even then you may be right that there was nothing as explicitly on the nose until the 20th century.

TV tropes and Mr Smithsonian are still late to the race in the scheme of things but nearer the pointy end than my original post may have given credit.

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