Essays on European Literature

Description

Kritische Essays zur europäischen Literatur. Translated by Michael Kowal. Although the reputation of the great German scholar Ernst Robert Curtius was firmly established for English and American readers by the translation of 'European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages', much of his work is still unknown to them. These twenty-four essays, written over a period of nearly thirty years, range widely in time and scope and consider some of the greatest figures in European literature, among them Virgil, Goethe, Balzac, Joyce, Eliot, Ortega y Gasset, and Hesse. The essays show the qualities that made Curtius one of the great critics of our age: his lucid, penetrating mind, his comprehensive erudition, his cosmopolitan outlook, and above all his passionate concern for European culture. Like T. S. Eliot, the subject of one of his finest essays, Curtius believed in an ideal order, a cultural unity of the West. The unifying element in all these essays is a concern to insure the conservation and continuance of European humanistic culture. For him this culture consisted of the literary heritage of Greece and Rome, developed and enriched by the Christian civilization of the Middle Ages. Consequently he selected for discussion those poets and writers who have been conscious of the unity of these two European currents and who have striven to maintain it in our time. As he ranged freely through the languages and literatures of all Western cultures, Curtius himself did much to preserve this tradition, to demonstrate its relevance, and insure its continuity. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v INTRODUCTION ix PREFACE TO THE FIRST AND SECOND EDITIONS xxv I. Virgil 3 II. Rudolf Borchardt on Virgil 18 III. Goethe as Critic 27 IV. Goethe as Administrator 58 V. Fundamental Features of Goethe's World 73 VI. Friedrich Schlegel and France 92 VII. Stefan George in Conversation 107 VIII. To the Memory of Hofmannsthal 129 A. Hofmannsthal's German Mission 129 B. Hofmannsthal and the Romance World 135 IX. George, Hofmannsthal, and Calderón 142 X. Hermann Hesse 169 XI. New Encounter with Balzac 189 XII. Emerson 211 XIII. Unamuno 228 XIV. Charles Du Bos 248 XV. Ortega y Gasset 282 I. 1924 282 II. 1949 300 XVI. Ramón Pérez de Ayala 318 XVII. James Joyce and His Ulysses 327 XVIII. T. S. Eliot 355 I. 1927 355 II. 1949 371 XIX. Toynbee's Theory of History 400 XX. Jorge Guillén 429 XXI. Remarks on the French Novel 437 XXII. The Young Cocteau 446 XXHI. William Goyen 456 XXIV. The Ship of the Argonauts 465 APPENDIX 497 INDEX 503