Abstract: Drawing on studies that posit a meaningful overlap between the theories and histories of translation and the early novel, this article argues that long eighteenth-century theories of translation helped the concept of fictionality consolidate for readers. During this period, translators framed their practice through the Pythagorean notion of the transmigration of souls and, in doing so, gesture toward an idea of imitation as an openly acknowledged re-creation of the original. This article examines how this particular framing of imitation also appeared in the distinct, but related, discourse of fiction using Daniel Defoe's A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy in Paris (1718) and Robinson Crusoe (1719) as examples. Defoe's texts help to demonstrate how references to translation help writers begin to gesture toward a realism that is marked by a narrative's capacity to feel real at the same time that it begins to gesture toward its status as fiction.
Aia Hussein Yousef (Sun,) studied this question.