ten can fairly be said to be familiar to the French public. All six of her novels having been translated into French very early on, between 1815 and 1824, and since then retranslated many times, Austen is more accessible in French than in any other language than English. Yet her place in French popular culture seems difficult to ascertain. For instance, the first website in French dedicated to Austen, "Jane Austen is my Wonderland" by "Alice," was only set up in 2010, like two blogs, "Les Romans de Jane Austen" and "I Love Jane Austen", followed by "Jane Austen and her World," created in 2013, and by a few others, as well as several Facebook pages. Most, if not all of these websites, are maintained by young female readers. While all of these resources offer summaries of Austen's novels and a biography of the author, they also devote plenty of space to the rewritings of her works and to the films and TV series inspired by her novels or loosely based on them or on her life, all of them of British or American origin. Austen has thus not really been appropriated by French popular culture, as shown by the English titles of many of these pages. More generally, the perception of Austen in France, caught between that of "an author for the cognoscenti," as Isabelle Bour puts it in "Jane Austen Victorienne" (73), and the image of a writer specializing in sentimental romances for teenagers set in a more or less idealized version of the English countryside, 1 has given rise in the last decade or so to studies by Lucile Trunel, Isabelle Bour, and Val erie Cossy, which all underline to varying
Translation is not an untroubled communication of a foreign text, but an interpretation that is always limited by its address to specific audiences and by the cultural or institutional situations where the translated text is intended to circulate and function', writes Lawrence Venuti. 1 A translation may function as a mask or a screen between the original work and the target audience, as Jacques Béreaud remarks, 2 but the cultural context in which that translation was produced may also work as a screen and condition some of the choices made by the translator. This essay aims at examining Jules Saladin's translation of Frankenstein in 1821 from this double perspective, reflecting on how it may have been influenced by the literary climate in which it came out and how it influenced it in its turn.The translations of Frankenstein published in French, either in France or in Frenchspeaking countries, have been well documented and include at least 12 different versions, although Saladin's, which was the first in any language and the only one produced in the 19 th century, remains to this day the only French translation of the 1818 text. 3 It was not reissued, however, until 1975, after which it was revised several times by different authors. An exhaustive record of the various translations of Frankenstein in French up to 2019, including a few adaptations in other formats (graphic novels, animation films, series), can be found online on nooSFere.org, a non-academic website devoted to science-fiction, completing the 1
L'ouvrage de Claire Wrobel s'appuie sur une citation de Michel Foucault qui sert d'épigraphe à l'introduction, selon laquelle « les espaces imaginaires » que sont « les paysages d'Ann Radcliffe […] sont comme la 'contre-figure' des transparences et des visibilités qu'on essaie d'établir 1 ». Le « on » de cette citation est celui de Jeremy Bentham, que Claire Wrobel propose ici, suivant l'hypothèse foucaldienne, de lire conjointement avec l'oeuvre de Radcliffe, parue pour l'essentiel dans les années 1790, afin d'explorer le rapport que le Panoptique entretient avec le roman gothique (p. 14). Les bornes chronologiques de ce livre, 1764 et 1842, correspondent d'une part à la publication de ce qui est considéré comme le premier roman gothique, The Castle of Otranto (Horace Walpole, 1764), et d'autre part à l'ouverture du pénitencier de Pentonville, inspiré des travaux de Bentham et inauguré 10 ans après sa mort. Le propos est mené avec rigueur, précision et conviction tout au long des 492 pages d'un texte qui se lit très bien et s'appuie sur de nombreuses citations toujours pertinentes, traduites pour ce qui est des passages en anglais. Dépourvue de jargon, la langue est soignée, avec peu de coquilles pour un livre de cette longueur, et quelques rares maladresses et répétitions qui n'entachent guère la qualité de l'expression. À une bibliographie bien organisée, l'ouvrage ajoute cinq index utiles, des noms, des oeuvres, des notions, des lieux, et des textes et événements historiques. 2 Le travail de Claire Wrobel marque un jalon important dans le développement en France des études croisant droit et littérature, études dont elle retrace la genèse et présente un panorama concis au début de l'ouvrage. Le projet, clairement exposé dans une introduction qui est un modèle du genre, fait constamment dialoguer les deux Claire Wrobel, Roman noir, réforme et surveillance en Angleterre (1764-1842) Revue d'études benthamiennes, 22 | 2022
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