A half-century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis still stands as a monumental achievement in literary criticism. A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. This new expanded edition includes a substantial essay in introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay, never before translated into English, in which Auerbach responds to his critics.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
The compass and the richness of the book can hardly be exaggerated. This is true too of the originality of Mr. Auerbach's critical method which is at once encyclopedic and microscopic, combining the disciplines of philology, literary criticism, and history. (The New York Times )
One of the most important and readable books in literary criticism of the past 15 years . . . The author, beginning with Homer and the Bible, traces the imitation of life in literature through the ages . . .touching upon every major literary figure in western culture on the way. (Publishers Weekly )
One of the great works of literary scholarship. . . . Auerbach's method . . . is to fasten with fastidious sensitivity on some stray phrase or passage in order to unpack from it a wealth of historical insight. It is his combination of scholarly erudition and critical astuteness which is most remarkable. (Terry Eagleton London Review of Books )
Written with the authority that comes from deep learning and full of information worth knowing. Princeton's 50th anniversary edition of Mimesis has an introduction by the late literary and cultural critic Edward Said that by itself is worth the price of the book. It's the only preface I know of that I wish were longer, serving as both an analysis of Auerbach and a ramework placing him in his scholarly and historical context. . . . Princeton's reissue of Mimesis is both timely and symbolic. (Guy Davenport Los Angeles Times Book Review )
[Mimesis] offers not just an eminent reading of the Western canon, but a mighty lesson on how to write. . . . I don't think a more significant or useful book of criticism has been written in the half-century since Mimesis was published. What's more, I can't imagine that anything like it will ever be written again. . . . [In] producing such a rich, strong book on how to read, Auerbach composed a virtual manual on how to write, one I've referred back to again and again since the day, almost two decades ago, when I first happened upon it. (Jim Lewis Slate Magazine )
One of the most important and readable books in literary criticism of the past 15 years . . . The author, beginning with Homer and the Bible, traces the imitation of life in literature through the ages . . .touching upon every major literary figure in western culture on the way. (Publishers Weekly )
One of the great works of literary scholarship. . . . Auerbach's method . . . is to fasten with fastidious sensitivity on some stray phrase or passage in order to unpack from it a wealth of historical insight. It is his combination of scholarly erudition and critical astuteness which is most remarkable. (Terry Eagleton London Review of Books )
Written with the authority that comes from deep learning and full of information worth knowing. Princeton's 50th anniversary edition of Mimesis has an introduction by the late literary and cultural critic Edward Said that by itself is worth the price of the book. It's the only preface I know of that I wish were longer, serving as both an analysis of Auerbach and a ramework placing him in his scholarly and historical context. . . . Princeton's reissue of Mimesis is both timely and symbolic. (Guy Davenport Los Angeles Times Book Review )
[Mimesis] offers not just an eminent reading of the Western canon, but a mighty lesson on how to write. . . . I don't think a more significant or useful book of criticism has been written in the half-century since Mimesis was published. What's more, I can't imagine that anything like it will ever be written again. . . . [In] producing such a rich, strong book on how to read, Auerbach composed a virtual manual on how to write, one I've referred back to again and again since the day, almost two decades ago, when I first happened upon it. (Jim Lewis Slate Magazine )
Review
To describe Mimesis as a classic is to offer something of a dismissive understatement, which conveys nothing of the excitement of this book, as fresh and direct, as untechnical, as when it first appeared. To say that it constitutes virtually a history of Western literature is to omit adding that it writes that history in a way that is still new and stimulating, with nothing of the manual about it, a synchronic kind of history with which we are only just now catching up. It is also important to stress the novel relationship Auerbach establishes between sentence or syntax and narrative form; and the world-wide democratic perspective in which he framed his work which has only become visible since globalization. Mimesis is certainly one of the half dozen most important literary-critical works of the twentieth century. (Fredric R. Jameson )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
123 of 127 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Indelible Interpretation of How People See Their World,
By Polonius (Flushing, NY United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Paperback)
In the 30 odd years since I read this book it has never been far from my thoughts. It has changed my understanding of how people think and how they look at their world. I cannot do true justice its impact. We are apt to think that people are the same wherever and whenever they lived. This is probably a legacy of our democratic, universalistic heritage. It is also what gets us in trouble when we get involved abroad in changing other nations and their societies. Auerbach shows us that humankind is not and has not been alike in its thoughts, aspirations and character but has distinctly changed and varied over time and place. By closely reading, analyzing and comparing texts of different periods through time, the author demonstrates how the structure of language interacts with the structure of thought, how the way one writes delimits ones vision. This is a more radical thought than its converse that the way we think affects how we write. To Auerbach, an early medieval religious writer, because of the way that Late Latin worked, could not think the way a classical author could. This seems intuitively wrong to a person who has knowledge of one language, but if you have ever tried to translate anything beyond the simplest sentence, you can appreciate what Auerbach means. This is one of those books that stay with you for a lifetime.
61 of 67 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
You simply cannot be a literary critic without reading this,
By
This review is from: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Paperback)
To paraphrase JOhn Lennon: evereybody's talking about Marxism and Modernism, Structuralism and sociologism, this-ism and that-ism; all I am saying, is give the narrative a chance. That is really what this greatest critic of all time - a man who is to literary criticism what Beethoven is to music, or Tocqueville to history, or Shakespeare to English poetry - ever did. Only he armed himselv with such a broad and wide-ranging array of different interpretative approaches, that he was always able to extract more, and more diverse, meanings, from any significant passage; and that not by illegitimately stretching the content to cover areas the writer had never conceived of, but simply by bringing out what already was there. His account of a passage in Ammianus Marcellinus, for instance, ought to be read by every historian of the late Roman Empire to understand what really was happening to that ancient civilization in the fourth century; as should his reading of a short story by Boccaccio (together, I would say, with Chesterton's magnificent essay on Chaucer) to understand the spirit that was awakening at the height of the Middle Ages. And this book is just as broad as it is sharp; just as it manages to pierce to the very heart of a single well-chosen subject, so too it covers the most extraordinary range of subjects, from the beginning of our culture (Homer and the book of Genesis) to high modernity (Proust), from the obscure (a stunning review of a bloody sixth-century anecdote by Gregory bishop of Tours) to the famous (Shakespeare). It is the finest book of literary criticism and history ever written, not only on account of its keen penetration and insight, but also of its enormous and wide-ranging learning, that allows the reader access to almost every century and every area of our Western heritage.
47 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Representing Reality,
By
This review is from: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Paperback)
Beginning with episodes in Homer and the Bible, this amazing study concludes by analyzing passages in Woolf and Proust. To echo Rene Wellek's assessment: it is a book of such scope and depth....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.... I returned to this book after being out of graduate school for twenty years (where it was already out of fashion in most English departments but read with care by all students of Comparative literature), and it is so much better this time around. The essay on Fortuna continues to resonate with timely warnings, and what I once admired about "Odysseus' Scar" is even more luminous after my recent rereading of the book.
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