1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910524690603321

Autore

Wiggin Bethany <1972->

Titolo

Novel Translations : The European Novel and the German Book, 1680–1730 / / Bethany Wiggin

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Ithaca, N.Y. : , : Cornell University Library, , 2011

©2011

ISBN

0-8014-7698-4

0-8014-6007-7

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (264 p.)

Collana

Signale : modern German letters, cultures, and thought

Disciplina

833/.509

Soggetti

European fiction - 18th century - History and criticism

European fiction - 17th century - History and criticism

French fiction - 18th century - Appreciation - Germany

French fiction - 17th century - Appreciation - Germany

German fiction - 18th century - History and criticism

German fiction - Early modern, 1500-1700 - History and criticism

German literature - French influences

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction : "little French books" and the European novel -- Fashion restructures the literary field -- Curing the French disease -- 1688 : the Roman becomes both poetical and popular -- 1696 : bringing the Roman to market -- Conclusion : Robinson Crusoe sails on the European market.

Sommario/riassunto

Many 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 Wiggins charts just one of the paths by which newness-in its avatars as fashion, novelties, and the novel-entered 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 galantes, and histories scandaleuses shaped German literary culture to a previously unrecognized extent. Wiggin contends that this French chapter in the German novel's history began to draw to a close only in the 1720's, more than sixty years after the word first migrated into German. Only gradually did the Roman go native; it remained laden with the baggage from its "French" origins even into the nineteenth century.