This Princeton Classics edition includes a substantial introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay in which Auerbach responds to his critics. Ranging over works in Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English, Auerbach used his remarkable skills in philology and comparative literature to refute any narrow form of nationalism or chauvinism, in his own day and ours.įor many readers, both inside and outside the academy, Mimesis is among the finest works of literary criticism ever written. This essentially optimistic view of European history now appears as a defensive-and impassioned-response to the inhumanity he saw in the Third Reich. His aim was to show how from antiquity to the twentieth century literature progressed toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. Displaced as he was, Auerbach produced a work of great erudition that contains no footnotes, basing his arguments instead on searching, illuminating readings of key passages from his primary texts. There he wrote Mimesis, publishing it in German after the end of the war.

Following the Nazi Revolution of 1933 and the triumph of Aryan philology, Auerbach began writing. He left for Turkey, where he taught at the state university in Istanbul. Auerbach’s goal in writing Figura and Mimesis was the rejection of Aryan philology and Nazi barbarism, based on racism, chauvinism and the mythologies of Blood, Volk and Soil, which eliminated the Old Testament from the Christian canon and hence from European culture and civilization. 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.Ī German Jew, Auerbach was forced out of his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935. 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. More than half a century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis remains a masterpiece of literary criticism.

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