Ernst Robert Curtius - Work

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 others. 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 conservative intelligentsia in Germany.

He is best known for his 1948 work Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter. It was a major study of the Medieval Latin literature and its effect on subsequent writing in modern European languages, and argued that, first, the standard "Classic-Medieval-Renaissance-Modern" division of literature was counterproductive given the continuity between those literatures, and second, that "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". The book was largely responsible for introducing the "literary topos" concept as a scholarly and critical discussion of literary commonplaces.