Mimesis, Desire, and the Novel ─ Rene Girard and Literary Criticism

Fifty years after its publication in English, Rene Girard's Deceit, Desire, and the Novel(1965) has never ceased to fascinate, challenge, inspire, and sometimes irritate, literary scholars. It has become one of the great classics of literary criticism, and the notion of triangular desire is now part of the theoretical parlance among critics and students. It also represents the genetic starting point for what has become one of the most encompassing, challenging, and far-reaching theories conceived in the humanities in the last century: mimetic theory. This book provides a forum for new generations of scholars and critics to reassess, challenge, and expand the theoretical and hermeneutical reach of key issues brought forward by Girard's book, including literary knowledge, realism and representation, imitation and the anxiety of influence, metaphysical desire, deviated transcendence, literature and religious experience, individualism and modernity, and death and resurrection. It also provides a more extensive and detailed historical understanding of the representation of desire, imitation, and rivalry within European and world literature, from Dante to Proust and from Dickens to Jonathan Littell.

Pierpaolo Antonello is Reader in Modern Italian Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of St. John’s College. With Rene Girard and Joao Cezar de Castro Rocha, he coauthoredEvolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture, and he is a member of the Research and Publications committees of Imitatio.
Heather Webb is lecturer in the Department of Italian at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Selwyn College. She specializes in medieval literature and culture with a particular interest in Dante. She is the author ofThe Medieval Heart and a number of articles on Catherine of Siena, Dante, and Giovanni da San Gimignano.