Mimesis: The Representations of Reality in Western Literature: the title is ambitious, resounding and far-reaching. Mimesis, the concept, has been a major topic of aesthetics at least since Aristotle. It has a vast literature of its own, but—like those equally big terms, representation and reality—as the object of debate and revision rather than something stable or univocal. All the more remarkable, then, that nowhere in its almost 600 pages does Mimesis give any definition or general characterisation of mimesis—or even try. All this is given the briefest of nods, and then only in the 4-page Epilogue:

My original starting point [which would thus be at one remove: the starting point from which I first of all started, which is not necessarily at all the point from which this present, finished book starts, but more like the starting point of the starting point] was Plato’s discussion in book 10 of the Republic--mimesis ranking third after truth--in conjunction with Dante’s assertion that in the Commedia he presented true reality. (554)

Instead of definition, we are launched straight into reading: or rather, already re-reading. The first words:

Readers of the Odyssey will remember the well-prepared and touching scene in book 19, when Odysseus has at last come home, the scene in which the old housekeeper Euryclea, who had been his nurse, recognises him by a scar on his thigh. (Auerbach 3)