European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages - Softcover

Curtius, Ernst

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0710002599 ISBN 13: 9780710002594

Publisher: Routledge & Kegan Paul PLC, 1979

Synopsis

In this "magnificent book" (T. S. Eliot), Ernst Robert Curtius (1886-1956), one of the foremost literary scholars of this century, examines the continuity of European literature from Homer to Goethe, with particular emphasis on the Latin Middle Ages. In an extensive new epilogue, drawing on hitherto unpublished material, Peter Godman analyzes the intellectual and political context and character of Curtius's ideas".This is the sort of book which takes much of a man's lifetime to produce and which can be read again and again with profit and pleasure. In effect it is an analysis of medieval Latin literature as a major stage in the transition from the Graeco-Roman classics to the modern vernacular literatures. No forbidding catalogue of periods, authors, and works, but literary criticism and literary history by a thoughtful scholar at home in classical, medieval, and modern literature, this is a powerfully presented and richly informative study of medieval standards, values, assumptions and literary conventions".--The Virginia Quarterly Review"We have in [this work] a vast store of significant learning, and many new and important insights into the humane literary heritage and its precarious transmission".--Francis Fergusson, The Hudson Review

About this title

Review

This is the sort of book which takes much of a man's lifetime to produce and which can be read again and again with profit and pleasure. In effect it is an analysis of medieval Latin literature as a major stage in the transition from the Graeco-Roman classics to the modern vernacular literatures. No forbidding catalogue of periods, authors, and works, but literary criticism and literary history by a thoughtful scholar at home in classical, medieval, and modern literature, this is a powerfully presented and richly informative study of medieval standards, values, assumptions and literary conventions. (The Virginia Quarterly Review )

We have in [this work] a vast store of significant learning, and many new and important insights into the humane literary heritage and its precarious transmission. (Francis Fergusson The Hudson Review )

A balanced introduction to Curtius studies, putting this masterpiece in context as the work of a German academic 'mandarin' whom family history, character, and intellectual training made an advocate for an elite European cultural cosmopolitanism. (Sixteenth Century Journal )

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge & Kegan Paul PLC
• Publication date: 1979
• ISBN 10: 0710002599
• ISBN 13: 9780710002594
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 680