Mimesis. The Representation of Realiry in Western Literature

📙 "There is no other work in contemporary literary criticism, known to me, that is comparable to [Mimesis] in scope, in analytical and historical richness; it is actually a history of European literature from the Odyssey to Ulysses and shows a quiet mastery of all the literatures of the West. I can never pick up this book without learning from it and without marveling at the penetration with which Auerbach's handling of his subject, the different forms by which the great European writers have shaped their ideas of reality, leads him to a new understanding of all postclassical literature."- Alfred Kazin, American Scholar. "Erich Auerbach begins his study by examining famous episodes in Homer and the Bible. He concludes by analyzing passages in Virginia Woolf and Proust. And his examination includes Tacitus, Petronius, St. Augustine, St. Francis, Dante, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Montaigne, Saint-Simon, Goethe, Schiller, Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert and Zola, among many others .... the compass and the richness of the book can hardly be exaggerated."-Delmore Schwartz, Neiu York Times Book Review '. "It is a book of such scope and breadth, ... it combines so many methods so skillfully, it raises so many questions of theory, history and criticism, it displays so much erudition, insight and wisdom, that it has been hailed as 'the most important and brilliant book in the field of aesthetics and literary history that has been published in the last fifty years.' "-Rene Wellek, Kenyon Review. "....