Leo Spitzer (7 February 1887 – 16 September 1960) was an Austrian Romanist and Hispanist, philologist, and an influential and prolific literary critic. He was known for his emphasis on stylistics. Along with Erich Auerbach, Spitzer is widely recognized as one of the foundational figures of comparative literature.

Biography

Spitzer was a doctoral student of Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke, receiving his doctorate in 1910. He was a professor at the University of Marburg in 1925, at the University of Cologne in 1930. In 1933 he was dismissed because of his Jewish background and left Nazi Germany, moving to Istanbul; his position was taken up by literary scholar and philologist Ernst Robert Curtius. In Istanbul, Spitzer taught at the Istanbul University for three years "as the first professor of Latin languages" and "as director of the School of Foreign Languages." From there he went to Johns Hopkins University in 1936 (succeeding the chair in Romance philology left vacant with the death of David S. Blondheim in 1934), where he remained for the rest of his life.

Legacy

According to René Wellek and Austin Warren:

Selected works