Negotiating Solitude and Loneliness in French and English Translations of Johann Georg Zimmermann’s German Bestseller Über die Einsamkeit (1784/85)

Abstract: Solitude was a hotly debated topic in late-eighteenth-century Europe. One of the most successful and influential contributions to this discussion was the four-volume work Über die Einsamkeit (“On Solitude,” 1784/85) by Swiss philosopher-physician Johann Georg Zimmermann. Mediated through a partial French translation (1788), it was widely distributed in English-language adaptations. Exploring how these translations of Zimmermann’s book contributed to the emergence of modern notions of loneliness in the West, the paper presents a case study for the interdependence of book history, emotional history, the history of translation and the history of concepts.