ABSTRACT
Erich Auerbach's Mimesis was published in 1946, Ernest Robert Curtius's Latin Middle Ages in 1948. Both emerge from what the Germans call Philologie, the study of language so defined as to include not only the chief tongues of our tradition at least, but also all the arts of letters, philosophy, history, anthropology, and 'culture'. Professor Curtius was known until Hitler as the great German critic of modern French literature, and also as one of the first and most important contributors to Thomas Stearns Eliot's Criterion. Dante Alighieri is of course the author who best exemplifies the medieval heritage, the process whereby it was acquired, and its transmission to the vernacular literatures. Professor Auerbach studies the representation of reality in twenty chapters, each based on one or more short passages from works of literature, beginning with the Odyssey and ending with To the Lighthouse. His conception of the religious realism contains his most original and illuminating insights.
