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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 Wiggin charts just one of the paths by which newnessùin its avatars as fashion, novelties, and the novelùentered 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. Bethany Wiggin contends that the French chapter in the German novel's history began to draw to a close only in the 1720's. --Book Jacket.
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