Erich Auerbach (1892-1957), best known for his classic literary study Mimesis, is celebrated today as a founder of comparative literature, a forerunner of secular criticism, and a prophet of global literary studies. Yet the true depth of Auerbach's thinking and writing remains unplumbed. Time, History, and Literature presents a wide selection of Auerbach's essays, many of which are little known outside the German-speaking world. Of the twenty essays culled for this volume from the full length of his career, twelve have never appeared in English before, and one is being published for the first time. Foregrounded in this major new collection are Auerbach's complex relationship to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, his philosophy of time and history, and his theory of human ethics and responsible action. Auerbach effectively charts out the difficult discovery, in the wake of Christianity, of the sensuous, the earthly, and the human and social worlds. A number of the essays reflect Auerbach's responses to an increasingly hostile National Socialist environment. These writings offer a challenging model of intellectual engagement, one that remains as compelling today as it was in Auerbach's own time.

More than half a century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis remains a masterpiece of literary criticism. 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. 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.

A German Jew, Auerbach was forced out of his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935. He left for Turkey, where he taught at the state university in Istanbul. There he wrote "Mimesis," publishing it in German after the end of the war. 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. His aim was to show how from antiquity to the twentieth century literature progressed toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. This essentially optimistic view of European history now appears as a defensive--and impassioned--response to the inhumanity he saw in the Third Reich. 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.

For many readers, both inside and outside the academy, "Mimesis" is among the finest works of literary criticism ever written. This Princeton Classics edition includes a substantial introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay in which Auerbach responds to his critics.

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) was one of the most original and idiosyncratic philosophers before Kant and Hegel. Although Giorgio Vasari had already diagnosed a cycle of rise, blossoming and decline in the history of art, Vico was the first to base this on a philosophical system. Isolated in Naples from direct contact with the philosophical life of his times, he worked at his grand design of the cycles of rise, blossoming, decline and eternal return which he saw in all areas of culture. His points of reference were ancient mythology and Greek and Roman history. To that extent, he is regarded today as the founder of the philosophy of history and the precursor of a tradition which extends to Hegel and Oswald Spengler's "Decline of the West."

Der Kulturhistoriker Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) zAhlt zu den bedeutendsten Kulturwissenschaftlern und Romanisten des 20. Jahrhunderts. Wie viele andere bedeutende Gelehrte emigrierte er frA1/4h aus Deutschland, um der Verfolgung durch die Nationalsozialisten zu entgehen. Bereits 1929 erschien sein Buch zu Dante, das trotz des etwas komplizierten Titels einen runden GesamtA1/4berblick A1/4ber das dichterische Schaffen des italienischen Nationaldichters gibt. Auerbach spA1/4rte in der GAttlichen KomAdie, Dantes Hauptwerk, viele Realismen auf. RA1/4ckbezA1/4ge auf die Welt des Irdischen bleiben auch im Grauen der HAlle, in der Hoffnung des Fegefeuers und in der religiAsen Ekstase des Paradieses deutlich. Dante schildert beispielsweise viele Zeitgenossen und ihre SA1/4nden, die dann entsprechend gebA1/4At werden. Bei Auerbach wird das Universum Dantes eindrucksvoll lebendig.

Erich Auerbach' s "Dante: Poet of the Secular World" is an inspiring introduction to one of world' s greatest poets as well as a brilliantly argued and still provocative essay in the history of ideas. Here Auerbach, thought by many to be the greatest of twentieth-century scholar-critics, makes the seemingly paradoxical claim that it is in the poetry of Dante, supreme among religious poets, and above all in the stanzas of his "Divine Comedy," that the secular world of the modern novel fi rst took imaginative form. Auerbach' s study of Dante, a precursor and necessary complement to "Mimesis," his magisterial overview of realism in Western literature, illuminates both the overall structure and the individual detail of Dante' s work, showing it to be an extraordinary synthesis of the sensuous and the conceptual, the particular and the universal, that redefi ned notions of human character and fate and opened the way into modernity.
CONTENTS
I. Historical Introduction; The Idea of Man in Literature
II. Dante's Early Poetry
III. The Subject of the " Comedy"
IV. The Structure of the " Comedy"
V. The Presentation
VI. The Survival and Transformation of Dante's Vision of Reality
Notes
Index

In this, his final book, Erich Auerbach writes, "My purpose is always to write history." Tracing the transformations of classical Latin rhetoric from late antiquity to the modern era, he explores major concerns raised in his "Mimesis" the historical and social contexts in which writings were received, and issues of aesthetics, semantics, stylistics, and sociology that anticipate the concerns of the new historicism.

"Scenes from the Drama of European Literature " was first published in 1984. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In his foreword to this reprint of Erich Auerbach's major essays, Paolo Valesio pays tribute to the author with an old saying that he feels is still the best metaphor for the genesis of a literary critic: the critic is born of the marriage of Mercury and Philology. The German-born Auerbach was a scholar who specialized in Romance philology, a tradition rooted in German historicism--the conviction that works of art must be judged as products of variable places and times, not from the eye of eternity, nor by a single unchanging aesthetic standard. The mercurial element in Auerbach's work is significant, for in a life of motion--of exile from Hitler's Germany--he came to believe that literary history was evolutionary, ever-changing--a view reflected in the title of his book, which suggests life and literature are historical drama.

Auerbach is best known for his magisterial study "Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature," written during the war, in Istanbul, when he was far from his own culture and from the books that he normally relied on. In 1957, just before his death, he arranged for the publication in English of his six most important essays, in a volume called "Scenes from the Drama of European Literature."As in "Mimesis," Auerbach's fresh insights bring to the disparate subjects of the essays a coherence that reflects the unity of Western, humanistic tradition, even while they hint at the deepening pessimism of his later years.

In the first essay, "Figura," Auerbach develops his concept of the figural interpretation of reality; applied here to Dante's "Divine Comedy," it also served as groundwork for his treatment of realism in "Mimesis." A second essay on Dante's examines the poet's depiction of St. Francis of Assisi. The next three essays deal with the paradoxical nature of Pascal's political thought; the merging of la cour and la ville--the king's entourage and the bourgeoisie--chiefly in relation to the seventeenth-century French theater; and Vico's formulation concepts by the German Romantics. In the final essay Auerbach confers upon Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal the designation "aesthetic dignity" because, not in spite of, the hideous reality of the peoms.

"A major collection of important essays on European literature, almost all classics, and almost all required reading for their various centuries--thus the book is indispensable for the medieval period, the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries; in addition, the 'Figura' and the Vico essays are very significant theoretical statements. The book is lucid and far more accessible for undergraduates than, say, current high theory. Nor has Auerbach's own work aged . . . All of his varied strengths are evidence in this collection, which is a better way into his work than "Mimesis." " -Fredric Jameson, University of California, Santa Cruz.