A half-century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach's "Mimesis" still stands as a monumental achievement in 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.

本书是德国当代著名学者埃里希·奥尔巴赫的经典之作，在西方学术界有着广泛的影响，曾再版九次，并被译为多种文字在许多国家出版。作者从美学的角度出发，用文学史家的眼光，对西方三千年来最具影响的经典文学如荷马史诗、教会文学。骑士小说以及法国、西班牙。德国、英国文学中具有代表性作品中的各种不同写实风格及其发展脉络做了精辟的分析，着重于“表现严肃性、冲突性或悲剧性的尺寸和方式问题”的分析方法已广为学术界所重视