Meanwhile, the translation of the Nights' Entertainments (q.v.) by Galland, 1704-17, and of numerous other Arabic and Persian works, the great encouragement extended to the literature of the East in the 17th'and 18th centuries, the publication of the Bibliotheque Orientalenf D'Ilerbelot, etc., created a taste for the brilliant exaggera tions of oriental fiction, and a variety of works were soon in the field, swarming with necromancers, dervishes, caliphs, bashaws, viziers, cadis, eunuch's, slaves. The most notable of these are—Les Mille et an Quart d'lleure, Conies Tartares; Les Contes Chinois, on les Aventures Merveilleutes du Mandarin Fum-hoam; and Les Sultanes de Guzaratte, Conks Mongols, of M. Gueulettc.—Of the class of fictions known as Voyages lmaginaires, the principal are the Histoire Comique des Estats et Empires de la Lune, and the Estats et Empires du Soleil of Cyrano Bergerac, which materially influenced the genius of Swift, who has, in fact, borrowed not a little from the first of these in his Gulliver's Travels, and which were themselves partly suggested by the Spanish romance of Dominico Gon zales, entitled The Man in the Moon. Such novels as the Paul et Virginie of Bernardin St. Pierre, which appeared towards the end of the 18th c., do not come under any of the four heads, but may most conveniently be mentioned here.
Prose fiction of Germany during the 18th and 19th eenturies.—The limits of our space Will not permit us to do more than superficially indicate the development of this branch of literature in Germany, which, however, is the less to be regretted, as, during the greater part of the 18th c., it did not attain much distinction. Toward the close of the century, however. writers became more numerous, and as the literary activity of many of them continued on till the first or second quarter of the 19th c., it will be most con venient and natural to treat both centuries together, as they, properly speaking, form only one era in the literary history of that nation.
The first eminent German novelist of this period was Wieland (q.v.), whose Greek romances, Agathon, Aristippus, Socrates, etc., are of that didactic and skeptical character which was beginning to mark the reflective genius of the continent, and which has since produced such immense changes in all departments of thought. Wieland was followed by a crowd of writers, in whose productions is more or less distinctly apparent the influence of the English novelists, partict;Iarly of Richardson and Fielding, who had been translated and carefully studied in Germany, where, however, the " novel of man ners," whether serious or comic, dealt more largely in the representation of "family life."
The principal names arc August la Fontaine, Wetzel, Muller (whose Siegfrkd von Lin denberg is still remembered and read), Schulz. and Rippe]. Almost contemporary with these quiet and somewhat prosaic novelists, there flourished for a brief period (1780 1800) a school of an entirely opposite character, whose works, fiercely and outrageously romantic, had their poetic counterpart in Schiller's Robbers. They resemble, in their style of handling the feudal ages, the English romances of Mrs. Radcliffe and others, which probably suggested them. The chief writers of this " turbulent school of fiction," as it has been called, are Cramer, Spiers, Schlenkert, and Veit Welter.
Alone, and far above all others in redundancy and originality of fancy, humor, and pathos, towers Jean Paul Richter (q.v.). who is incapable of classification, and to whom, therefore, his countrymen have affixed the epithet of De). Einzige (The Unique). Apart from all schools—in this respect, but in this only, like Richter—stands Johann Wolfgang Goethe (q.v.), whose novels, as warns his poems. are poetico-philosophic efforts to represent, perhaps to solve, the great facts and problems of human life and destiny.
The reaction from the materialism and irreligious levity of French thought, ftst showed itself in Germany toward the close of the 18th c., in a certain eArnest love and study of the old, simple, superstitious, and poetical beliefs of the middle' ages. Hence originated the exquisite class of fictions called Volksmiihrchen (popular legends or tales), in which the Germans have never been equaled. The most illustrious 'cultivator of this species of fiction is Ludwig Tieek (q.v.), for Musfens (q.v.), though gifted with ad mirable powers of narration, is marked by a skeptical humor and irony, not altogether compatible with an imaginative conception of his subject. Other distinguished names are those of De la Motte Fouque (q.v.), Chamisso (q.v.), Heinrich Steffens, Achim von Arnim (q.v.), Clemens Brentano (q.v.), Zsehokke, and Hoffman (q.v.). :More recent novelists of note are Auerback, Freytag, and Paul lIeyse. The tales of Fritz Reuter, written in the Platt or Low German, arc original and delightful.