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| | Dufn_Hist |
 | | The target of Wieland's wit and humor is the provinciality, lack of taste, pedantry, backwardness, bigotry, narrow-mindedness, ignorance, and sodden contentment with things as they are, which he found in people all around him. |
| | But instead of attacking the follies of his German contemporaries directly, he sets his novel in the small Thracian city-state of Abdera in the fifth century B.C. This novel is one of the sprightliest literary achievements of the Enlightenment in Germany, and reveals that Wieland was a kindred spirit of Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne. |
| | This is the reason, Wieland says, that although he had thought he was writing about fools in ancient Thrace, some people came to believe that he was describing his contemporaries. |
| www.lehigh.edu /library/lup/BookPages/DufnHist.htm?All (378 words) |
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