European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages
A philologist traces the unbroken thread running from Homer and Virgil through Dante to Goethe.
Curtius wrote this during and after the Second World War, tracing an unbroken literary tradition from Homer and Virgil through the Latin Middle Ages to Dante and Goethe. His method is the topos, the inherited commonplace, and his purpose was to show that European literature is one continuous body of work at a moment when Europe was tearing itself apart. Widely regarded as the finest work of literary scholarship of its century.
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Harold Bloom
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.
Interview · August 2011
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