) was an Austrian Romanist

Romance studies

Romance studies is an umbrella academic discipline that covers the study of the languages, literatures, and cultures of areas that speak a Romance language. Romance studies departments usually include the study of Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese...

 and Hispanist

Hispanist

A Hispanist is a scholar specialising in Hispanic studies, that is Spanish or Portuguese language, literature, linguistics, or civilization, and by extension, Basque, Catalan and Galician....

, and an influential and prolific literary critic. He was known for his emphasis on stylistics

Stylistics (linguistics)

Stylistics is the study and interpretation of texts from a linguistic perspective. As a discipline it links literary criticism and linguistics, but has no autonomous domain of its own...

.

He was a doctoral student of Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke

Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke

Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke was a Swiss philologist of the Neogrammarian school of linguistics.Born in Dübendorf, he performed several comparative studies of the Romance languages...

, receiving his doctorate in 1910. He was a professor of the University of Marburg in 1925, at the University of Cologne

University of Cologne

The University of Cologne is one of the oldest universities in Europe and, with over 44,000 students, one of the largest universities in Germany. The university is part of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, an association of Germany's leading research universities...

 in 1930. He left Germany in 1933, moving to Istanbul

Istanbul

Istanbul , historically known as Byzantium and Constantinople , is the largest city of Turkey. Istanbul metropolitan province had 13.26 million people living in it as of December, 2010, which is 18% of Turkey's population and the 3rd largest metropolitan area in Europe after London and...

. From there he went to Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins University

The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...

 in 1936 (succeeding the chair in Romance philology

Romance languages

The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...

 left vacant with the death of David S. Blondheim in 1934), where he remained for the rest of his life.

According to René Wellek

René Wellek

René Wellek was a Czech-American comparative literary critic. Like Erich Auerbach, Wellek was an eminent product of the Central European philological tradition and was known as a vastly erudite and "fair-minded critic of critics."René Wellek was born and raised in Vienna, speaking Czech and German...

 and Austin Warren

Austin Warren

Austin Warren was an American literary critic, author, and professor of English.-Childhood and Education:...

: