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Matthew Wright. The Comedian as Critic: Greek Old Comedy and Po- etics. London: Bristol Classical Press, 2012. Pp. xi, 238. $120.00. ISBN 978-1-7809-3029-9.
This book argues that old comedy engaged in literary criticism. This fairly rea- sonable assertion (Frogs, after all, tends to be standard reading for ancient liter- ary theory courses) is supported by two rather surprising claims: that comedians generally aimed for an "elite" target audience and that they wrote primarily to be read later by these elite readers, not for popular performance. Wright is confi- dently reactionary against notions of performance culture (3-4, 142) and offers instead the idea of a reading culture. Different from some recent notions of reading culture as primarily social and performative (for example, W. Johnson, AJP 121 [2000] 593-627), Wright's notion is instead rather modern-looking: one where comedians in libraries assiduously plant allusions to be discovered later by equally assiduous readers.
Chapter 1, "Reading Comic Criticism," spells out three positions that are important for the book as a whole: first that comedy was aimed to please an elite "target" audience...