Ernst Robert Curtius

Ernst Robert Curtius (April 14, 1886 – April 19, 1956) was a German literary scholar, a philologist and Romance language literary critic.

He is best known for his 1948 work Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter.[1] It was a major study of the Medieval Latin literature and its effect on subsequent writing in modern European languages. The book was largely responsible for introducing the literary topos concept as a scholarly and critical discussion of literary commonplaces.[1]

Curtius studied philology and philosophy in Strasbourg, Berlin, and Heidelberg. He was a professor in Marburg, Heidelberg, and Bonn and was a proponent of French literature to the German public. He died in Rome.

He studied for a year at Cambridge, where he met the poet and author Stephen Spender. Their relationship during Spender's resulting stays in Hamburg is shown in the semi-fictionalised autobiography, The Temple. This novel also portrays Curtius (known as Ernst Stockmann in the novel) as homosexual.

Ernst Curtius, his grandfather, and Georg Curtius, his great-uncle, were both notable scholars. He was Alsatian, being born in Thann, into a north German family.

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  1. ^ English translation European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, by Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper Row, Publishers, 1953 ISBN 0691018995

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