Ernst Robert Curtius

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For the German archaeologist, see Ernst Curtius
Ernst Robert Curtius

Ernst Robert Curtius (

philologist, and Romance languages literary critic
, best known for his 1948 study Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter, translated in English as European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.

Biography

Curtius was

Heidelberg; he wrote his Habilitationsschrift for Gröber in Bonn, 1913, and began teaching there in 1914. World War I interrupted his scholarly work: Curtius served in France and Poland and was wounded in 1915; his injuries were severe enough for him to be discharged in 1916; he returned to Bonn to resume teaching.[1]
At Heidelberg, in 1924, he was appointed to the University’s chair of Romance Philology.[3]

Work

Much of Curtius's work was done while the Nazis were in power, and his interest in humanist studies is usually seen as a response to the totalitarianism of his times. Curtius saw European literature as part of a continuous tradition that began with the Greek and Latin authors and continued throughout the Middle Ages; he did not acknowledge a break between those traditions, a division that would separate historical periods from each other and support a set of national literatures without connections to each other. Greatly interested in French literature, early in his career he promoted the study of that literature in a period in Germany when it was considered the enemy's literature, a "humanist and heroic" stance that earned him the criticism of the nationalist intelligentsia in Germany.[4]

He is best known for his 1948 work Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter.

European languages. Curtius argues that, first, the standard "Classic-Medieval-Renaissance-Modern" division of literature was counterproductive given the continuity between those literatures; and second, that, in the words of L.R. Lind, "much of Renaissance and later European literature cannot be fully understood without a knowledge of that literature's relation to Medieval Latin rhetoric in the use of commonplaces, metaphors, turns of phrase, or, to employ the term Curtius prefers, topoi".[6] The book was largely responsible for introducing the concept of the "literary topos" into scholarly and critical discussion of literary commonplaces.[4][7]

Bibliography

  • Die literarischen Wegbereiter des neuen Frankreich (1919)
  • Die Französische Kultur (1931), translation as The Civilization of France: An Introduction (1932)
  • Deutscher Geist in Gefahr (1932)
  • "Zur Literarästhetik des Mittelalters," Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 58 (1938), 1–50, 129–232, and 433–79
  • Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (1948), translation as European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages by Willard R. Trask
  • Französischer Geist im 20. Jahrhundert (1952)

References

  1. ^
    ISBN 978-0-8153-2890-2
    . Retrieved 23 April 2012.
  2. ISBN 978-1-400-87196-4
    . Retrieved 27 March 2022.
  3. ^ Evans Jr. 2015, p. 91.
  4. ^
    ISBN 978-0-85991-532-8
    . Retrieved 23 April 2012.
  5. ISBN 0-691-01899-5
  6. JSTOR 4342972
    .
  7. ISBN 978-0-520-94851-8
    . Retrieved 23 April 2012.

External links
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