European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages by Ernst Robert Curtius (736 pages, translated from German by Willard Trask)

My Great Thanks to Max u for the Amazon Gift Card That Allowed me to read this book.

"This is, I think, the finest work of literary scholarship in my time, by the great German philologist Ernst Robert Curtius. It is an extraordinary study of the continuity of European literature, from Homer and the other Greeks, on through Virgil and the great Latin writers, to a culmination in Dante, and moving beyond to a consideration of a long tradition that concludes with Goethe. . . . It is from Curtius that I have learned--and others go on learning--what literature is, and why I myself would call it a way of life and a way of thought."--Harold Bloom, FiveBooks

European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages by Ernst Robert Curtius is the most challenging and the most illuminating work of literary history I have ever read.  It is the product of a lifetime of scholarship, deep and broad  reading in Greek, Latin and Romance Languages literary works.  The theme of the book, which I was completely convinced was correct by the time I finished the work, is that the time honored standard pedagogical division of European literary history into classical, medieval, Renaissance, and modern eras is counterproductive and leads to misunderstandings based on a belief in breaks in tradition.  Curtius lays out the development of European literature from Classical Greek and Roman writers, much space is devoted to Virgil and of course Homer.  When Curtius stepped back from close reading to expand broadly on European society and literature I was very much in awe.

Curtius details how medieval theories of rhetoric drew from Latin and Greek roots and how out of this grew the work of writers like Dante and Boccaccio.  Both men were educated in Aristolean rhetoric theories, Curtius tells us Aristotle's poetics began to be intensely studied about 1250.  The metaphors and story lines of Ovid, whom I am now reading after a very long hiatus, and Virgil greatly influenced writers of Italy and France, as Curtius very well documents.  Curtius work for me destroyed the standard teaching models  of European literature and actually culture as a whole.  

Curtius shows us how Don Quixote arises from late medieval romances drawn from stories developed from ancient roots.  From Don Quixote the  European  novel was born.  Curtius talks a good bit about the historical roots of T. S. Eliot from Dante.  In my mind I imagined James Joyce shaping the modern novel through rhetorical devices and structures borrowed from Homer and Dante.

This is a book that could be read with profit numerous times.  It changed how I see literature.  I think the old fashioned pedagogical classifications with the dark ages thrown in there broken when writers and artists rediscover the Greeks and Latin writers is still taught in almost all universities almost out of laziness.  Curtius did much of his work living in Germany when it was ruled by the Nazis.  His work is on the surface pure scholarship but under that I think there is a magnificent message of multiculturalism and the power of the best of human achievement to endure.

For me,  European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages was a gestalt changing work.  Once again I learned that what I was taught in the academy was wrong.  

I strongly urge all literary autodidacts to read this book.  

Ernst Robert Curtius (1886 to 1956) was a German literary scholar and historian, philogist, and a Romance language literary critic.  His most famous work is European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.

Mel u

The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne Booth (First Edition, 1961, Second Edition 1983)

"My subject is the technique of non-didactic fiction, viewed as the art of communicating with readers—the rhetorical resources available to the writer of epic, novel, or short story as he tries, consciously or unconsciously, to impose his fictional world upon the reader. Though the problems raised by rhetoric in this sense are found in didactic works like  Gulliver’s Travels, Pilgrim’s Progress, and 1984, they are seen more clearly in non-didactic works like Tom Jones, Middlemarch, and Light in August. Is there any defense that can be offered, on aesthetic grounds, for an art full of rhetorical appeals? What kind of art is it that will allow Flaubert to barge into his action to describe Emma as “unaware that now she was eager to yield to the very thing that had made her so indignant,” and as “totally unconscious that she was prostituting herself”? Whatever their answers, critics have often been troubled by this kind of overt, distinguishable rhetoric. But it takes no very deep analysis to show that the same problems are raised, though in less obvious form, by the disguised rhetoric of modern fiction; when Henry James says that he has invented a ficelle because the reader, not the hero, needs a “friend,” the ostensibly dramatic move is still rhetorical; it is dictated by the effort to help the reader grasp the work. I am aware that in pursuing the author’s means of controlling his reader I have arbitrarily isolated technique from all of the social and psychological forces that affect authors and readers." From the preface to the first edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction

Wayne Booth's (1921 to 2005, USA) Rhetoric of Fiction, was first published in 1961.  In 1983 a second edition with a very lengthy response to commentaries on his ideas was published.  Almost upon publication it became one of the most influential works of literary theory written by an American after World War Two.   I read it for the first time in 1970 and my ways of looking at literature were very influenced by his great ideas about how fiction works.  I decided to reread it and I saw again how much my thinking about fiction is influenced by it. 

  Before I read The Rhetoric of Fiction, I had read no works of literary theory.  I have read lots of literary theory, history, criticism, and such since  then but nothing as good, as interesting and insightful as The Rhetoric of Fiction. His ideas are still near the center of academic thoughts on how literature works.  

The roots of the ideas of Booth go back to The Poetics of Aristotle with an intensive reading of the prefaces of Henry James as authoritative.  He makes frequent refrences to a book once very trendy The Craft of Fiction by Percy Lubbuck (1927).  Broadly stated, the topic of the book is the methods authors use to create responses in readers.  He talks a lot about different kinds of narration, about the difference between "showing and telling", about authorial intrusions, implied versus real authors.  The works he refers to most are Tom Jones and The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. (Booth wrote his dissertation on  Sterne).  He devotes a chapter to the control of distance in Emma.  

As I was reading The Rhetoric of Fiction I was also reading a novel by Rosamond Lehmann, The Weather in the Street.  In his preface to the second edition of his books, Booth suggested his reader instead of relying on his examples that one apply his ideas to a work you are reading or know well.  As I read the marvelous work of Lehmann I thought one could easily right a long article which would illustrate the illuminating power of Booth's ideas as it applies to the narrative method of Lehmann.

Anyone who wants to understand how fiction works should read this book.  It is a bit academic at times, meaning it is one professor arguing with others, but it is very readable, lucid and totally interesting.  I hope to reread Tom Jones soon, read Emma for the first time, and maybe Sterne.

This is a brilliant book.

Mel u