In his book Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, first published in 1946, Erich Auerbach sought to examine the emergence of literary realism from a pan-European perspective. Life Worlds is linked to Auerbach’s work in that it seeks to formulate a literary history of all Europeans. However, while Auerbach pursued a question that is immanent to literature, this work views the history of literature as a process of literary modernization that is related to history in general.