13: The Great Preface

Welcome to the thirteenth episode of A History of Literary Criticism, a podcast about the history of literary criticism. Today’s episode is focused on a single text—The Great Preface. First we’ll discuss the social context and text itself and I’ll then move on to a discussion of the text itself. This discussion is divided into two main parts—firstly, what The Great Preface says about the nature and role of poetry, and then a discussion of the more ‘literary criticism’ aspects, including the categorisation of poetry and poetic genres.