ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which the eighteenth-century English translations presented themselves to their readers. Franco Moretti's quantitative analysis of the 'translation waves' of Don Quixote-the 'first international bestseller', as he puts it-sheds light on the role of variously configured reading publics in the constitution of European identity. The successive versions of Don Quixote also point toward changes in the concept of authorship throughout the period. It is not entirely the case, as George Steiner argued, that translators have only recently begun 'emerging from a background of indistinct solitude'. Over the course of the first 150 years of translations of Don Quixote, people also see the rise of a new phenomenon, the modern classic, which is concurrent with the emergence of the modern use of the word literature in English over the course of the eighteenth century. Alexander Tytler's reliance on examples of translations from modern languages in order to justify his theoretical principles bespeaks a profound change.
