Description
Book SynopsisMany early novels were cosmopolitan books, read from London to Leipzig and beyond, available in nearly simultaneous translations into French, English, German, and other European languages. In Novel Translations, Bethany Wiggin charts just one of the paths by which newnessin its avatars as fashion, novelties, and the novelentered the European world in the decades around 1700. As readers across Europe snapped up novels, they domesticated the genre. Across borders, the novel lent readers everywhere a suggestion of sophistication, a familiarity with circumstances beyond their local ken.
Into the eighteenth century, the modern German novel was not German at all; rather, it was French, as suggested by Germans'' usage of the French word Roman to describe a wide variety of genres: pastoral romances, war and travel chronicles, heroic narratives, and courtly fictions. Carried in large part on the coattails of the Huguenot diaspora, these romans, nouvelles, amours secrets, histoires gal
Trade Review
"Bethany Wiggin addresses the culture of the novel in Europe in what she argues should be understood as the important transitional period of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Though she focuses primarily on German-language works, Wiggin intervenes in histories of the novel told merely as narratives of nation, working comparatively across the German-language, French, and English traditions. Deeply engaged with contemporary debates about translation and transnationalism, globalism and world literature, print culture and gender, Wiggin puts pressure on both period and genre categories in innovative ways. Novel Translations will encourage scholars in a number of fields to take a second look at the intersection of several European cultures in these neglected years."—Jane O. Newman, University of California, Irvine
"This book is an excellent and welcome addition to the discussion of the early modern evolution of the novel in general and of the European influences on the German novel, in particular. Wiggin approaches this traditional field in a new and exciting way by presenting fresh information that leads her to stimulating and original interpretations on the basis of a well-synthesized review of current and past critical literature. Her book impresses with its broad disciplinary reach within the context of early modern German studies as it addresses the seasoned scholars with new ideas and approaches graduate students with interpretations and explorations of a variety of narratives, inviting them to engage with a literature quite distant from their accustomed reading experiences."—Gerhild S. Williams, Associate Vice Chancellor and Barbara Schaps Thomas & David M. Thomas Professor in the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis
Table of Contents
Introduction: "Little French books" and the European Novel
1. Fashion Restructures the Literary Field
2. Curing the French Disease
3. 1688: The Roman Becomes Both Poetical and Popular
4. 1696: Bringing the Roman to Market
Conclusion. Robinson Crusoe Sails on the European MarketBibliography
Index
