Mimesis

Erich Auerbach's study traces how Western writers have represented reality, from ancient epic to the modern novel. Rather than surveying literature by period or nation, he examines selected passages in close detail, paying attention to word choice, rhetorical method, and narrative technique. The book opens with a comparison between the scar of Odysseus, recognized in Homer, and the story of Abraham in Genesis, two very different ways of depicting the world.

The chapters move through a wide range of authors and eras. They cover Petronius, the Old French Song of Roland and Chrétien de Troyes, Gregory of Tours, Dante, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Montaigne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Molière, Racine, Prévost, Schiller, Stendhal, the Goncourt brothers, Zola, and Virginia Woolf. Although the scope is broad, each study is precise and focused, and together they show that the way a writer handles language is what distinguishes one vision of reality from another.

Auerbach argues that the changing ways writers have depicted reality also reflect larger shifts in European culture, and his book is often read as a history of that imaginative effort. The original German edition appeared in 1946, written while Auerbach was in exile in Istanbul, far from the scholarly libraries he would have had in Germany.