Truth and Wonder is an accessible introduction to Plato and Aristotle, showing their crucial influence for literary and cultural studies, modern languages and related disciplines. It demonstrates the ways their philosophies still shape our reading, thinking and living.
Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, UK, and has published widely on contemporary literature and literary theory, contemporary European philosophy and Holocaust and Genocide studies. He is the author of Doing English (fourth edition, 2017), editor of Brexit and Literature (2018) and co-editor, with Daniel O'Gorman, of The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction (2018).
Introduction: Plato and Aristotle for and as literature 1. Three words: Polis and Logos Part One: 'WHat is truly written in the soul': Plato 2. Plato's literary devices 3. Watching The Republic 4. Responding to The Republic 5. Living and dead words: Phaedrus 6. A hermeneutic dialectic? Ion, Protagoras Part Two: 'The lover of stories is a lover of wisdom': Aristotle 7. Reading Aristotle, from beginnings to ends 8. How to live: happiness, the virtues and literature: Nicomachean Ethics 9. Everyday People: The Rhetoric 10. Patterns of Literature, patterns of life: the Poetics 11. But what, after all, is entertainment? The pleasures of literature: The Poetics Conclusion: Starting