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| | Sample Chapter for Auerbach, E.; Trask, W., trans.: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. |
 | | The historical trajectory that is the spine of Mimesis is the passage from the separation of styles in classical antiquity, to their mingling in the New Testament, their first great climax in Dante's Divine Comedy, and their ultimate apotheosis in the French realistic authors of the nineteenth century--Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, and then Proust. |
 | | In Mimesis, he resolutely sticks to his practice of working from disconnected fragments: each of the book's chapters is marked not only by a new author who bears little overt relationship to earlier ones, but also by a new beginning, in terms of the author's perspective and stylistic outlook, so to speak. |
 | | But the triumph of Mimesis, as well as its inevitable tragic flaw, is that the human mind studying literary representations of the historical world can only do so as all authors do--from the limited perspective of their own time and their own work. |
| press.princeton.edu /chapters/i50.html (6526 words) |
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