Daniel Stoppe's Fables: A “Second-Tier” Version of the Genre in the Early Enlightenment?

Summary

ALTHOUGH WE FIND A WIDE RANGE of studies about the popular genre of the fable in the eighteenth century, recent scholarship mainly focuses on “first-tier” writers such as Christian Fürchtegott Gellert and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. While Gellert and Lessing provide us with historically significant examples of the fable in the period, focusing on their work alone risks neglecting the diversity of the genre as well as its historical development, as it ignores a wider field of practitioners. Writers like Daniel Stoppe (1697–1747), quite popular and prominently discussed in their time, are often overlooked in academic research or even deemed unworthy of being considered by scholars. Only one recent publication dedicates a chapter to Stoppe's fables: Kristin Eichhorn's 2013 doctoral dissertation on Die Kunst des moralischen Dichtens (The Art of Moral Poetry) in the eighteenth century emphasizes Stoppe's and especially Daniel Wilhelm Triller's contribution to the recovery of the fable in the early Enlightenment.

In his lifetime, however, Stoppe was well known in literary circles. Between 1719 and 1722 he studied at the University of Leipzig, supported by rich patrons. In 1728 he became a member of the “Deutsche Gesellschaft” (German Society) but returned to Hirschberg to earn his keep as a private teacher. This background distinguishes him from other contemporary fable writers, who were professors or held public positions: he was also living outside the literary centers—literally marginal to the poetological debates of the day. After publishing cantatas, arias, satirical verse epistles, and casual poetry, he wrote fables that became the subject of his contemporaries’ discussion of the genre. Even though Stoppe was soon considered a “second-tier” writer, his fables show a distinct style and played an integral part in the genre's development in the early Enlightenment. In this essay I will give an overview of the specific characteristics of Stoppe's fables and provide the literary contexts in which he was writing, such as the tradition of the genre, its theoretical reference points, and also the contemporary perception of his works. Taking another look at them will therefore expand our historical understanding of the fable genre. Moreover, their reception amongst Stoppe's contemporaries shows how the efforts of standardization and the dynamics of literary networks influenced the assessment of an author as “second-tier.”