Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

From the Back Cover: One of the most significant works of literary criticism of this century, Erich Auerbach's MIMESIS undertakes a new and profound approach to major moments in Western literature. More than a work of literary criticism, this study is filled with insights into the Western imagination and Western culture itself, in its repeated attempts to master and control reality and experience. Auerbach's studies range from the beginnings of Western literary consciousness to the present. The significant moments of art and awareness he studies are in themselves keys to the meaning of Homer, Petronius, Gregory of Tours, The song of Roland, Chretien de Troyes, Dante, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Cevantes, Moliere, Racine, the Abbe Prevost, Schiller, Stendhal, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Zola, Virginia Woolf, and others. Comprehensive as his survey is in scope, the studies themselves are closely focused, penetrating, and minute, and serve to show how the strategies of language and rhetoric are the ultimate ways in which the various images are distinguishable from each other in their grasp and representation of reality. The major revolutios in the sense and portrayal of reality are seen to reverberate deeply with significances relevant to transformations in our culture.