Eric Auerbach - Mimesis - The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
As opposed to this I see the possibility of success and profit in a method that consists in letting myself be guided by a few motifs which I have worked out gradually and without a specific purpose, and in trying them out on a series of texts which have become familiar and vital to me in the course of my philological activity; for I am convinced that these basic motifs in the history of the representation of reality—provided I have seen them correctly—must be demonstrable in any random realistic text.