Of Graver Import Than History: Psychiatry in Fiction

In Chapter 9 of the Poetics, Aristotle wrote that “poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars”. This is a classic tenet to whose abstract significance we often pay lip service without recognizing the dynamic role it could play in our interpretation of the literary arts. However, to make it viable for application to modern works, we need only broaden the term history to include those behavioral sciences which have evolved since Aristotle’s time.

Volume 2, Number 1 (1978)