Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

With the help of brilliantly selected excerpts from works of art from antiquity to modernity, the author depicts the history of "mimesis" as the history of changing forms of interaction between literature and reality in different historical periods. Each chapter of the book begins with a characteristic quote, which becomes the starting point of interpretation, presenting a portrait of the era and its main idea.

The scale of the work itself is impressive in its coverage of the material - from Homer and the Bible, figurative realism of the Middle Ages, humanist literature of the Renaissance, the combination of serious and grotesque of the Romantic era, domestic and everyday realism in the literature of the 19th century to modernist searches in the works of Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf.

At the end, Auerbach speaks of the need for a common understanding of the European past - obviously, with the idea that without it a common future is also impossible. This view may be particularly close to the Ukrainian reader, who now has the opportunity to become acquainted for the first time with a key literary work dedicated to European literature in Ukrainian translation.