How did humans respond to the eighteenth-century discovery of countless new species of animals? This book explores the gamut of intense human-animal interactions: from love to cultural identifications, moral reflections, philosophical debates, classification systems, mechanical copies, insults and literary creativity. Dogs, cats and horses, of course, play central roles. But this volume also features human reflections upon parrots, songbirds, monkeys, a rhino, an elephant, pigs, and geese - all the way through to the admired silkworms and the not-so-admired bookworms. An exceptionally wide array of source materials are used in this volume's ten separate contributions, plus the editorial introduction, to demonstrate this diversity. As eighteenth-century humans came to realise that they too are animals, they had to recast their relationships with their fellow living-beings on Planet Earth. And these considerations remain very much live ones to this day.

Francois Salignac de la Mothe-Fenelon, Archbishop of Cambrai (1651-1715) exerted a considerable influence on the development and spread of the Enlightenment. His most famous work, the Homeric novel Les Aventures de Telemaque, Fils d'Ulysse (1699), composed for the education of his pupil Duc de Bourgogne, was, after the Bible, the most widely read literary work in France throughout the eighteenth century. It was also translated and adapted into many other European languages. And yet oddly enough, the question as to why Fenelon's ideas resonated over such a wide span of space and time has as yet found no coherent and comprehensive answer. By taking Fenelon's intellectual influence as a matter of 'cultural translation', this anthology traces the reception of Fenelon and his multifaceted writings outside of France, and in doing so aims to enrich not only our understanding of the Enlightenment, but also of the thinker himself.

Goethe released occasional poetry from the heteronomous dictates of political interests by extending the traditional representative function of court poetry and using it as a vehicle both for criticism of courtly life and for literary self-advertisement. His texts of this kind display not only a high degree of individualization and a marked instrumentalization of the genre but also a shift of functional emphasis away from aristocratic (self-)glorification and toward literary publicity. For a limited period, occasional poetry was thus (re-)discovered and newly defined as a genre of high literary distinction.

The obvious gaps in standardisation in German baroque poetics are partially filled by poetological prefaces. Despite this, however, taught genre norms remain quite tentative. This absence of binding norms affords an artistic latitude, the significance of which has hitherto been underestimated. The study provides a systematic analysis of the theoretical genre standards laid down in poetological manuals and prefaces. The wealth of material presented also makes the volume useful as a compendium of genre history.

Given that the dissemination of enlightened thought in Europe was mostly effected through translations, the present collection of essays focuses on how its cultural adaptation took place in various national contexts. For the first time, the theoretical model of 'cultural transfer' (Espagne/Werner) is applied to the eighteenth century: The intercultural dynamics of the Enlightenment become manifest in the transformation process between the original and target cultures, be it by way of acculturation, creative enhancement, or misunderstanding. Resulting in shifts of meaning, translations offer a key not just to contemporary translation practice but to the discursive network of the European Enlightenment in general. The case studies united here explore both how translations contributed to the transnational standardisation of certain key concepts, values and texts, and how they reflect national specifications of enlightened discourses. Hence, the volume contributes to Enlightenment studies, at least as much as to historical translation studies.