Since Plato's Republic, mimesis -- the artwork's tacit claim to reflect or imitate real life -- has faced a near-constant stream of assaults, being accused of naturalising a supposedly uncomplicated relationship between world and fiction. Lines of Mimesis offers a revisionary account of mimesis. Specifically, it proposes a rethinking of the representational attitudes of two literary schools usually understood to be at odds with one another -- Romanticism and Realism -- through close readings of writings and drawings made by two figures usually taken to be proponents of those schools respectively: E. T. A. Hoffmann and Honor