Jaillant, Lise, ed. Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. vii, 280 pp. £80. Hardcover, illus. (ISBN: 978-1-4744-4080-6).

2021 ◽  
Vol 115 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-394
Author(s):  
Nicola Wilson
Keyword(s):  

Modernism and Non-Translation proposes a new way of reading key modernist texts, including the work of canonical figures such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound. The topic of this book is the incorporation of untranslated fragments from various languages within modernist writing. It explores non-translation in modernist fiction, poetry, and other forms, with a principally European focus. The intention is to begin to answer a question that demands collective expertise: what are the aesthetic and cultural implications of non-translation for modernist literature? How did non-translation shape the poetics, and cultural politics, of some of the most important writers of this period? Twelve essays by leading scholars of modernism explore American, British, and Irish texts, alongside major French and German writers, and the wider modernist recovery of Classical languages. They explore non-translation from the dual perspectives of both ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’, unsettling that false opposition, and articulating in the process their individuality of expression and experience. The range explored indicates something of the reach and vitality of the matter of translation—and specifically non-translation—across a selection of poetry, fiction, and non-fictional prose, while focusing on mainly canonical voices. Offering a series of case studies, the volume aims to encourage further exploration of connections across languages and among writers. Together, the collection seeks to provoke and extend debate on the aesthetic, cultural, political, and conceptual dimensions of non-translation as an important yet hitherto neglected facet of modernism, helping to redefine our understanding of that movement. It demonstrates the rich possibilities of reading modernism through instances of non-translation.


Author(s):  
Mark Williams

This concluding chapter argues that the critical contexts of the literary texts dealt with in this volume cannot be so confined inside the period before 1950, not merely for writers whose works have maintained or increased their esteem, but also for the bulk of that work belonging to the large categories of colonial, Victorian, and even nationalist writing that exhibits the values and attitudes of empire. Much of the postcolonial criticism of colonial fiction treats it as symptomatic of imperial views on race, nature, gender, or progress rather than as literature Criticism in this volume means something distinct from that applied to nineteenth-century English literature or American modernist fiction where the specifically literary qualities and values of the writing remain central concerns of its criticism, even where the values and ideology of modernism, for example, have been sharply contested.


2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 460-463
Author(s):  
Tamara Radak
Keyword(s):  

1993 ◽  
Vol 88 (1) ◽  
pp. 176
Author(s):  
Angela Smith ◽  
Sydney Janet Kaplan ◽  
Heather Murray

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