Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature () is a book of literary criticism by Erich Auerbach, and his most well known work. Written while Auerbach was teaching in Istanbul, Turkey, where he fled after being ousted from his professorship in Romance Philology at the University of Marburg by the Nazis in 1935, it was first published in 1946 by A. Francke Verlag. Mimesis opens with a comparison between the way the world is represented in Homer’s Odyssey and the way it appears in the Bible. From these two seminal Western texts, Auerbach builds the foundation for a unified theory of representation that spans the entire history of Western literature, including even the Modernist novelists writing at the time Auerbach began his study. Overview Mimesis gives an account of the way in which everyday life in its seriousness has been represented by many Western writers, from ancient Greek and Roman writers such as Petronius and Tacitus, early Christian writers such as Augustine, Medieval writers such as Chretien de Troyes, Dante, and Boccaccio, Renaissance writers such as Montaigne, Rabelais, Shakespeare and Cervantes, seventeenth-century writers such as Molière and Racine, Enlightenment writers such as Voltaire, nineteenth-century writers such as Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola, all the way up to twentieth-century writers such as Proust, and Woolf. Despite his treatment of the many major works, Auerbach apparently did not think he was comprehensive enough, and apologized in the original publication in 1946 explaining that he had access only to the 'insufficient' resources available in the library at Istanbul University where he worked; Auerbach did not know Turkish and so could not use locally available sources, and did not have access to non-Turkish secondary sources. The mode of literary criticism in which Mimesis operates is often referred to among contemporary critics as historicism, since Auerbach largely regarded the way reality was represented in the literature of various periods to be intimately bound up with social and intellectual conventions of the time in which they were written. In this he followed Giambattista Vico. Auerbach considered himself a historical perspectivist in the German tradition (he mentioned Hegel in this respect) exploring specific features of style, grammar, syntax, and diction claims about much broader cultural and historical questions. Of Mimesis, Auerbach wrote that his "purpose is always to write history." He is in the same German tradition of philology as Ernst Curtius, Leo Spitzer, and Karl