Mimēsis

A crucial term in the literary theories of Plato and Aristotle, mimesis describes the relation between the words of a literary work and the actions and events they recount. In Plato, the term usually means ‘imitation’ and suggests that poetry is derived from and inferior to reality; in Aristotle, it loses this pejorative connotation and tends to mean simply ‘representation’ and to indicate that the world presented in a poem is much like, but not identical with, our own.