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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 most well 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,[1] 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, memoirs 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.

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Fiftieth Anniversary Edition. Trans. Willard Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Bakker, Egbert. "Mimesis as Performance: Rereading Auerbach’s First Chapter." 20.1 (1999): 11–26.

Poetics Today

. “Realism.” Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 184.

Baldick, Chris

Bremmer, Jan. "Erich Auerbach and His Mimesis." Poetics Today 20.1 (1999): 3–10.

. "Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis – ’Tis Fifty Years Since: A Reassessment." Style 33.3 (1999): 463–74.

Calin, William

Doran, Robert. "." New Literary History 38.2 (2007): 353–69.

Literary History and the Sublime in Erich Auerbach's Mimesis

Green, Geoffrey. "Erich Auerbach." Literary Criticism & the Structures of History: Erich Auerbach & Leo Spitzer. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

Holmes, Jonathan, and Streete, Adrian, eds. Refiguring Mimesis: Representation in Early Modern Literature. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2005.

Holquist, Michael. “Erich Auerbach and the Fate of Philology Today.” Poetics Today 20.1 (1999): 77-91.

Landauer, Carl. "Mimesis and Erich Auerbach’s Self-Mythologizing." German Studies Review 11.1 (1988): 83-96.

. Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Lerer, Seth

"New Impressions V: Auerbach’s Mimesis." Essays in Criticism 54.1 (2004): 60-74.

Nuttall, A. D.

Said, Edward W. Introduction to Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. First Princeton Classic edition. Trans. Willard Trask. ISBN 978-0-691-16022-1. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.

by Arthur Krystal in The New Yorker (Dec. 9, 2013)

"The Book of Books: Erich Auerbach and the making of Mimesis"