Realism and translation

A new scholar book with Brontë-related content:

Landscapes of Realism
Rethinking literary realism in comparative perspectives
Volume I: Mapping realism
Edited by  Dirk Göttsche, Rosa Mucignat and Robert Weninger

John Benjamins Publishing Company

ISBN: 9789027208064

April 2021

Few literary phenomena are as elusive and yet as persistent as realism. While it responds to the perennial impulse to use literature to reflect on experience, it also designates a specific set of literary and artistic practices that emerged in response to Western modernity. Landscapes of Realism is a two-volume collaborative interdisciplinary exploration of this vast territory, bringing together leading-edge new criticism on the realist paradigms that were first articulated in nineteenth-century Europe but have since gone on globally to transform the literary landscape. Tracing the manifold ways in which these paradigms are developed, discussed and contested across time, space, cultures and media, this first volume tackles in its five core essays and twenty-five case studies such questions as why realism emerged when it did, why and how it developed such a transformative dynamic across languages, to what extent realist poetics remain central to art and popular culture after 1900, and how generally to reassess realism from a twenty-first-century comparative perspective.

The book includes the chapter:

Realism and translation. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre for an Austro-Hungarian minority and beyond by Tatjana Jukić

Drawing on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), I first show how the Victorian novel processes translation out of the narrative in order to espouse the metonymic imperative of realism. While this may be how the relation of realism and translation is decided in the Victorian novel, I argue that the subsequent history of translation of Brontë’s novel remains inflected in this relation. Taking Croatian translations of Jane Eyre as a case study, I analyze the ways in which they remain predicated on the metonymic imperative of realism, first in Austria-Hungary, when metonymy on these terms was adopted by Austro-Hungarian minorities as a vehicle of modern self-definition, and then in a process that survives the historical Austria-Hungary well into the twentieth century, in Yugoslav modernity for instance. What these translations ultimately sustain, and reveal, is radical realism: not a poetics so much as an apparatus instrumental to negotiating the modern condition in the past two centuries.