Mimesis Annotated: Annotating Mimesis

Monday, January 14, 2030

Annotating Mimesis

Erich Auerbach's Mimesis is one of the great works of literary criticism of the twentieth century, and yet students are put off by the many untranslated quotations from Latin, Medieval Italian, Medieval French, Modern French, Spanish and German. I teach this book to first year students at UEA who are understandably daunted by the demands it seems to make on its readers.

This resource aims in the first instance simply to supply annotations containing literal English translations of all the untranslated material in Willard R. Trask's otherwise excellent text. The initial aim is to provide students and readers not conversant in Auerbach's many languages with the basic information they need to read the text.

If you would like to contribute to this project--for instance if you are teaching a chapter of Auerbach's book and would be interested in providing annotations to that chapter--I would love to hear from you. Please contact me.

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About the Contributors

Matthew Taunton works on twentieth-century literature and cultural history. His first book Fictions of the City: Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris examines literary and cinematic representations of mass housing. His second book is about British writers and the Russian Revolution. He is deputy editor of Critical Quarterly and teaches Auerbach to English Literature students at the University of East Anglia.

James Wood works on eighteenth-century and romantic literature, with a focus on the connections between literature and sociability. His first book Anecdotes of Enlightenment explores the role conversational anecdotes play in the literature and philosophy of the Enlightenment. In his second book Friendship and the Anglo-Irish Writer, 1680-1750 he is investigating how Irish Protestant writers in the eighteenth-century use the idea and practice of friendship to redefine their relationship with England. His work appears in the journals Eighteenth-Century Life, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Criticism, and the new Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.