Auerbach's Renaissance
Rebirths of an Aesthetic from Shakespeare to Ferrante

Focusing on Auerbach's reading in Mimesis of the aesthetic of Renaissance writing, Christopher Warley discovers a future for literary study.

Chris Warley (Author)

9781009545495, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 April 2025

288 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2 cm, 0.59 kg

'An exciting development in Renaissance studies today is a return to theory that brings literature into the foreground as open possibility. Christopher Warley's brilliant book on Shakespeare and the most famous innovator in postwar literary theory, Erich Auerbach, leads the field for new possibilities in Renaissance studies.' Gordon Teskey, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature, Harvard University

Erich Auerbach's Mimesis is among the most admired works of literary criticism of the last hundred years. Amidst the horrors of the Second World War, Auerbach's prodigious learning managed – almost miraculously – to give voice to a delicate, subtle optimism. Focusing on Auerbach's account of Renaissance literature, Christopher Warley rediscovers the powerful beauty of Mimesis and shows its vitality for contemporary literary criticism. Analysing Auerbach's account of Renaissance love lyric alongside Woolf's To the Lighthouse, fifteenth-century Burgundian writing alongside Ferrante, and Shakespeare alongside Michelet, Ruskin and Burckhardt, Auerbach's Renaissance traces an aesthetic that celebrates the diversity of human life. Simultaneously it locates in Auerbach's reading of Renaissance writing a challenge to the pessimism of today, the sense that we live in an endless present where the future looms only as a threat. Auerbach's scholarship, the art he learns from Dante, Rabelais, Montaigne, and Shakespeare, is a Renaissance offering democratic possibility.

Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations of frequently cited texts
1. The sentimental tourist
2. The coy critic
3. At the foot of the mountain of purgatory
4. The mixed style
5. The friendly word
6. Standard operating procedure
7. Two stories of brave mothers
Afterword to his coy mistress
List of figures.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]