DANIEL WILHELM TRILLER (1695–1782) is one of those many authors whose work has been largely ignored owing to a generally stronger research focus within German Studies on the literature of the second half rather than on the first fifty years of the eighteenth century. Although British Empiricism was proving influential at that time on the continent as well, the first phase of the Enlightenment still tends to be interpreted as the period in which Rationalism—as introduced by philosophers such as René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz— reigned supreme. When it comes to eighteenth-century German poetics, scholars often hold Johann Christoph Gottsched as the dominant figure of literary debate; tellingly, even until recently the epithet Literaturpapst (literary pope) has been used to refer to Gottsched in historical surveys of the period. Gottsched's role was indeed a significant one: his Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst vor die Deutschen (Attempt at Critical Poetics for the Germans, 1730) established the most important normative poetics since Martin Opitz's Buch von der Deutschen Poeterey (Book of German Poetics, 1624). Only a few decades later, however, its strict set of rules was already heavily attacked by the younger generation. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and later the Stürmer und Dränger, for instance, claimed that the individual poet—the genius—had to follow his/her nature instead of a set of general rules as Gottsched had suggested. Ironically, his polemic dismissal in the second half of the century played a pivotal role in cementing the impression of Gottsched's aesthetic leadership in the decades before. Thus a number of early eighteenth-century writers have often been categorized as “mere Gottschedians,” implying that their literary approach was not only outdated with regard to the aesthetic developments to come but also unoriginal and unworthy of scholarly attention. Even scholars like Elisabeth Herbrand, who dedicates an entire chapter to Triller in her extensive study on the fable, eventually concludes that Triller has made no relevant contribution to the development of the genre, and ultimately remains a “trivial” author. Although critics nowadays no longer apply the glib label of “minor” or “trivial” to early-century authors there is still a broad tendency in German Studies to focus on later “accomplishments” and “innovations” such as Genieästhetik or Autonomieästhetik and to value older concepts only insofar as they lead up to these inevitable teleological “goals” around 1800.