Literary theory that is

I read part of this for my undergraduate thesis, and always intended to go back to it at some point. Yesterday I found a copy of it on the clearance rack at a used book store

For those unfamiliar, Auerbach wrote this in exile from Germany from the Nazis in Istanbul. Lacking access to Western research libraries, he instead turned to close analyses of a variety of texts to analyze the traditions of depicting reality in Western literature. In the famous first chapter, he compares the incident of Odysseus' scar and the story of Abraham in the Old Testament in a way that illuminates both in an entirely new way. Mind-blowing stuff

Link for the curious