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Germans Love David Hasselhoff/Literature: Difference between revisions
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* Another historical use would be the immense popularity of the ''[[Arabian Nights]]'' in Europe and America after they were first translated. While not hugely ''un''popular in the Middle East, the tales that came into Western knowledge were often not of massive importance and were actually looked down upon at several points in history. The popularity of translations, however, soared through the roof, having a huge influence on European and American writers and accumulating devoted fans and even fan societies.
* France was pretty much the only place where [[Philip K. Dick]] achieved much fame as something more than a cult writer, until the last few years of his life. Possibly because the themes of his stories tended to dovetail with the ideas of then-current French [[Post Modernism|postmodernist]] philosophy.
* ''[[Jennings]]'', a series of humorous English children's books set to a boarding school, were fairly successful in their native country but were (and are) overshadowed by the more famous ''[[Just William]]'' stories by Richmal Crompton. They became hugely popular in Norway under the name ''Stompa''. The Norwegian translations of the books spawned four feature films and a radio sitcom series in the fifties and sixties. Reruns of the radio episodes are still being broadcasted regularly, by popular demand.
* Given that there's been manga, anime and video game adaptations of the Australian fantasy book series ''[[Deltora Quest]]'', it must be mighty popular over there.
* ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'' became so extremely popular in Sweden in the 1970s that their national non-commercial TV made a film of the first half of ''Fellowship of the Ring'' (it was pretty bad, suffering from too much cheap blue-screen technology). Interestingly, the trilogy was translated already in 1958 but spent the 1960s in relative obscurity.
* The Canadian novel ''[[Anne of Green Gables]]'' is very popular in Japan. There's even an anime based on it. The touristy areas of the real province of Prince Edward Island tend to have signs written in Japanese underneath English ones, also.
** The anime was dubbed to Persian and it was reran twice because of its popularity amongst teenagers. [[Adaptation Displacement|Albeit the source material was not very well received there]].
* The Irish novelist [[Darren Shan]]'s horror works are apparently popular amongst female Japanese teenagers. Go figure. His vampire series even had a manga adaptation.
* ''[[wikipedia:How the Steel Was Tempered|How Steel Was Tempered]]'', a classic example of [[Socialist Realism]], was removed from school syllabi as soon as [[The Great Politics Mess-Up|the USSR kicked the bucket]] and quickly became [[Deader Than Disco]] in Russia. In China, it is still popular enough to warrant a miniseries (!).
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* In 1872, a British author named "Ouida" (Marie Louise de la Ramee) published a book called ''[[A Dog of Flanders]]''. It's a sentimental [[Tear Jerker]] set in impoverished rural Flanders about a boy and his dog. It faded from memory rather fast and is now quite obscure in the Western world... but a Japanese diplomat loved it, brought it back to his home country, and now it's considered a classic of Western children's literature there. The novel even draws Japanese tourists to Belgium (and Antwerp in particular), where they are moved to tears by the cathedral (it has to do with the infamous ending), leading Belgians to wonder ''what the heck is going on''. (This also fits under "Anime and Manga," since the anime adaptations are part of the reason the story is so popular.)
* While he may have lived there and based many of his books in Rhode Island, a surprising amount of Rhode Islanders have no idea who [[H.P. Lovecraft]] is.
** On that note, France really loves Lovecraft and his [[Cthulhu Mythos]] (and other similar pulp authors, to a degree). A 3-[[Doorstopper]] omnibus of his entire collected writings is perrennially reprinted since the 80's at least, and at any one time several publishers have a number of short story collections in print; for at least a decade (before Lovecraft's renewed popularity and the advent of Project Gutenberg) it was easier to find his books in french bookstores than in american ones. There's even a publisher, Nouvelles editions Oswald ([[Fun with Acronyms|NeO for short]]) which specializes in late 19th/early-to-mid 20th century pulp authors, which runs collections of the works of [[Clark Ashton Smith]] and [[Robert E. Howard]] (also [[Lord Dunsany]] and [[Edgar Rice Burroughs]]), which are long out of print (or rarely reprinted) in english. Strangely enough, this can be at least partly traced to the high popularity of the ''[[Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game)]]'' role-playing in the hexagon (see the [[Tabletop Games]] section), which made french geeks curious about the rest of anglo-saxon pulp literature.
* The Australian novel ''[[The Tomorrow Series|Tomorrow, When the War Began]]'' was selected by the Swedish government in 2000 as one of the books most likely to inspire a love of reading in young people, and financed its translation and distribution to every school-age child in Sweden.
** This trope was likewise [[Americans Hate Tingle|inverted]] with the cold reception that the books received when they were released in America.
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