Mimesis

Erich Auerbach's Mimesis examines how European literature has represented reality from antiquity to the twentieth century. Moving from Homer to Virginia Woolf, Auerbach builds his argument through close readings of key passages in Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English. His comparative method shows how style, social perspective, and historical conditions shape what literature allows readers to recognize as ordinary or real.

Auerbach wrote the book after Nazi persecution forced him from his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935. He continued his career at the state university in Istanbul, producing a work of wide erudition without footnotes and grounding its claims in sustained attention to primary texts. The study proposes a long movement toward more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation, an optimistic account that also answers the nationalism and inhumanity of the Third Reich.

The expanded edition adds a substantial introduction by Edward W. Said and an essay in which Auerbach responds to his critics. Said's framing highlights the importance of displacement to the book's broad European vision. Mimesis joins philology, comparative literature, and intellectual history in a defense of reading across linguistic and national boundaries. Its method demonstrates how individual passages can disclose changing assumptions about class, dignity, history, and the place of everyday life in serious literature.