The classic book that has taught generations how to read Western literature 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 depict reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. A German Jew who was forced out of his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935, Auerbach left for Turkey, where he taught in Istanbul. There he wrote Mimesis, publishing it in German after 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 modernity, literature progresses toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. Ranging over works in Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English, Auerbach uses his remarkable skills in philology and comparative literature to present an optimistic view of Western history and culture and to refute any narrow form of nationalism or chauvinism. This expanded Princeton Classics edition of Mimesis includes a substantial introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay in which Auerbach responds to his critics.

This exciting compendium brings together, for the first time, some of the foremost scholars of René Girard’s mimetic theory, with leading imitation researchers from the cognitive, developmental, and neuro sciences. These chapters explore some of the major discoveries and developments concerning the foundational, yet previously overlooked, role of imitation in human life, revealing the unique theoretical links that can now be made from the neural basis of social interaction to the structure and evolution of human culture and religion. Together, mimetic scholars and imitation researchers are on the cutting edge of some of the most important breakthroughs in understanding the distinctive human capacity for both incredible acts of empathy and compassion as well as mass antipathy and violence. As a result, this interdisciplinary volume promises to help shed light on some of the most pressing and complex questions of our contemporary world.

"A fundamental historical account of the much-cited but little-studied concept of mimesis, and an essential starting point for all future discussions of this crucial critical concept."—Hayden White

Mimesis and Theory brings together twenty previously uncollected essays on literature and literary theory by one of the most important thinkers of the past thirty years.

The politics of literature in the construction of worlds The Russian Revolution was a literary as well as political upheaval. With a focus on the revolutionary works of Andrei Platonov and the futurist collective Oberiu, leading Russian literary thinker Valery Podoroga shows how profoundly the Soviet experiment overturned the traditional expectations of fiction and poetry. The production of this groundbreaking new work was inextricably interwoven with the political and historical debates of the time. This volume expands on Podoroga’s critical exploration of the analytic anthropology of literature. Here he delves into the ways literature can be used in ‘world-building’, both in terms of what happens inside the narrative and how it reflects the external world. He explores the function of the work outside of its time: both as a means to project itself into the future and as a document of a former age. How are we to read the past through these works of the imagination? With an introductory essay from the author’s daughter, Ioulia Podoroga.

The Russian Revolution was a literary as well as political upheaval. With a focus on the revolutionary works of Andrei Platonov and the futurist collective Oberiu, leading Russian literary thinker Valery Podoroga shows how profoundly the Soviet experiment overturned the traditional expectations of fiction and poetry. The production of this groundbreaking new work was inextricably interwoven with the political and historical debates of the time. This volume expands on Podoroga's critical exploration of the analytic anthropology of literature. Here he delves into the ways literature can be used in 'world-building', both in terms of what happens inside the narrative and how it reflects the external world. He explores the function of the work outside of its time: both as a means to project itself into the future and as a document of a former age. How are we to read the past through these works of the imagination? With an introductory essay from the author's daughter, Ioulia Podoroga.

In Romantic theories of art and literature, the notion of mimesis&—defined as art&’s reflection of the external world&—became introspective and self-reflexive as poets and artists sought to represent the act of creativity itself. Frederick Burwick seeks to elucidate this Romantic aesthetic, first by offering an understanding of key Romantic mimetic concepts and then by analyzing manifestations of the mimetic process in literary works of the period. Burwick explores the mimetic concepts of &"art for art's sake,&" &"Idem et Alter,&" and &"palingenesis of mind as art&" by drawing on the theories of Philo of Alexandria, Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Friederich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Thomas De Quincey, and Germaine de Sta&ël. Having established the philosophical bases of these key mimetic concepts, Burwick analyzes manifestations of mimesis in the literature of the period, including ekphrasis in the work of Thomas De Quincey, mirrored images in the poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, and the twice-told tale in the novels of Charles Brockden Brown, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and James Hogg. Although artists of this period have traditionally been dismissed in discussions of mimesis, Burwick demonstrates that mimetic concepts comprised a major component of the Romantic aesthetic.

Mimesis is one of the oldest, most fundamental concepts in Western aesthetics. This book offers a new, searching treatment of its long history at the center of theories of representational art: above all, in the highly influential writings of Plato and Aristotle, but also in later Greco-Roman philosophy and criticism, and subsequently in many areas of aesthetic controversy from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Combining classical scholarship, philosophical analysis, and the history of ideas--and ranging across discussion of poetry, painting, and music--Stephen Halliwell shows with a wealth of detail how mimesis, at all stages of its evolution, has been a more complex, variable concept than its conventional translation of "imitation" can now convey. Far from providing a static model of artistic representation, mimesis has generated many different models of art, encompassing a spectrum of positions from realism to idealism. Under the influence of Platonist and Aristotelian paradigms, mimesis has been a crux of debate between proponents of what Halliwell calls "world-reflecting" and "world-simulating" theories of representation in both the visual and musico-poetic arts. This debate is about not only the fraught relationship between art and reality but also the psychology and ethics of how we experience and are affected by mimetic art. Moving expertly between ancient and modern traditions, Halliwell contends that the history of mimesis hinges on problems that continue to be of urgent concern for contemporary aesthetics.