Auerbach:Mimesis

Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) was a professor of Romance philology at the University of Marburg until 1935. After being dismissed from his position by the Nazis, he emigrated to the United States via Turkey. During his exile in Istanbul, he wrote his major work, Mimesis, from 1942 to 1945, which has become a classic of modern literary scholarship since its first publication in Switzerland. Through a series of authoritative individual studies, the author describes the history of mimesis as the history of the various forms that the relationship between literature and reality has taken in different historical periods, thereby also tracing the development of realism in European and particularly French literature.