Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (German: Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur) is a book of literary criticism by Erich Auerbach and his best-known work. It was written in German between 1942 and 1945, while Auerbach was teaching in Istanbul, Turkey, where he fled after being ousted from his professorship in Romance Philology at the University of Marburg by the Nazis in 1935. It was first published in Switzerland in 1946 by A. Francke Verlag, with an English translation by Princeton University Press following in 1953, since when it has remained in print. Mimesis is arranged in twenty sections, in chronological order. Each section analyses one to three works from the particular period, often beginning with a lengthy extract from the work, given in the original language and English translation. Nearly all the passages selected are narratives of some sort (# 12, covering an essay by Michel de Montaigne is one exception). The literary forms covered include epic poetry, novels, plays, memoir, and letters. The book opens with a comparison between the way the world is represented in Homer’s Odyssey and the way it appears in the biblical Book of Genesis's account of the Sacrifice of Isaac, and ends with analysis of a passage from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927). From his analyses, Auerbach attempts to make the foundation for a unified theory of representation that spans the entire history of Western literature, including even the Modernist novelists writing at the time Auerbach began his study.