Translators, Interpreters, Mediators

This collection comprises selected essays from a conference held at Chawton House Library in March 2006. It focuses on women writers as translators who interpreted and mediated across cultural boundaries and between national contexts in the period 1700-1900. In this period, which saw women writers negotiating their right to central positions in the literary marketplace, attitudes to and enthusiasm for translations were never fixed. This volume contributes to our understanding of the waxing and waning of the importance of translation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rejecting from the outset the notion of translations as ‘defective females’, each essay engages with the author it discusses as an innovator, and investigates to what extent she viewed her labours not as hack-work, nor as an interpretation of the original text, but rather as a creative original. Authors discussed are from Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Turkey and North America and include figures now best known for their other publications, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Isabelle de Charrière, Therese Huber and Elizabeth Barrett Browning as well as lesser-known writers such as Fatma Aliye, Anna Jameson and Anne Gilchrist.

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