Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century France and England

Stedman, Gesa

doi:10.4324/9781315258744

Cited by 6 publications

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“…Parallel to this interest in cultural transfers is an interest on both formal and informal pan‐European networks in the republic of letters, concentrating on salons and literary societies. There is an inevitable focus on translation in such studies, but not necessarily a focus on the novel, or indeed an exclusive focus on the 18th century: many scholars also deal with the 17th and 19th centuries (Andries et al; Brown and Dow; Gonthier and Sandrier; Ogée; Thomson et al; Stedman; Stockhorst).…”

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confidence: 99%

Translation, Cross‐Channel Exchanges and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century

Dow

2014

Literature Compass

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Cross-channel exchanges in the rise of the novel in the long 18th century have become an emerging area of scholarly interest in the last decade, informed by new work on cultural exchanges and on translation theory, and earlier work on book history and reception studies. And yet this is an area that is yet to move beyond exceptional case studies of individual translations and translators, much less to fully articulate what is at stake for the study of the 18th-century novel, or indeed 18th-century studies more generally. This article traces the field from the mid-1970s to today, arguing that the study of women writers has been central to our growing recognition that the novel was shaped by pan-European and cross-channel exchanges and translation. It concludes by highlighting the main threat to the field: the dearth of language-learning. Translation -in the 18th century, and now -is thus presented as a political issue.[W]hat is of consequence is, I feel, not the individuality of any particular novel or story but the individuality of a French author or of fiction labelled "From the French" in the eyes of its contemporary readers and critics. Moreover, though it is tempting to speculate what the well-educated Englishman (or woman) thought of these novels as he perused them in the original, the fact is that the vogue existed because of the mono-lingual British reader who was more than happy, as evidence will show, to accept the translations as a welcome addition to his literary fare.(Grieder, ix)Comprendre la place, réelle aussi bien que symbolique, du texte traduit dans l'esthétique du dix-huitième siècle, envisager l'idée même de la traduction comme mode d'écriture, considérer l'approche de l'original dans son rapport aux notions d'origine et d'originalité, tels sont sans doute les grands traits du travail qui permettrait de donner à cette activité singulière toute la place qui lui revient dans l'histoire de la littérature du XVIII e siècle. (Charles, 147) Thirty years -not to mention the English Channel/La Manche -separates the publication of Josephine Grieder's book-length 1975 study Translations of French Sentimental Prose Fiction in late eighteenth-century England and Shelly Charles's chapter 'Traduire au XVIII e siècle' in a 2005 collection of essays The Eighteenth Century Now (Mallinson). Yet the position each author adopts is on the surface strikingly similar. Each claims that the novel is at the centre of 18th-century translation activity, each argues that a literary historian who is eager to understand the marketplace for fiction ignores the existence of novels in translation at his or her peril. Both point out that actual translations of novels have not been examined in all their intricacies. As much

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confidence: 99%