In English literature, characters of indeterminate sex created by novelists range from the ambi-gendered narrators in Victorian novels to the protagonists of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Brigid Brophy's In Transit, Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve, and Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body. A unique experiment in French is Anne Garréta's Sphinx. Translating such texts from one language into the other is a challenge; different strategies of ‘degendering’ have to be used in Germanic and Romance languages respectively. This essay discusses examples of translations which successfully preserve gender indeterminacy, but also translations which ignore authorial intentions and reintroduce gender markings. Typical strategies are observed as well as imaginative solutions for special situations.
"Fictional biography" and "factual biography" can be described as opposite literary genres. Both texts are fictions in the sense of mental constructs made up from the available facts, yet they differ radically in methods and status. Biographical knowledge is advanced by their separate existence rather than by efforts to combine them.
Feminist research has explored the specific qualities of female works and the intertextual relations between them. By now, the time has come to transcend the model of 'a literature of their own' and to inquire into the inf luences, interconnections and processes of cooperation between men and women. Ideally, future literary histories would trace patterns of heterosocial interaction. My essay shows how recent scholarship has been working towards this aim. Monographs on individual women writers favour descriptive and interpretative categories with masculine connotations, thus opening up possibilities of relating female to male literary production. Studies of groups of women similarly foreground a collective interest in 'male' topics (such as politics, revolution, reason or history) and read the works as feminine-inf lected discussions of subjects of general interest. Case studies of male and female literary cooperation supply samples for the new kind of historiography by exploring the dynamics of transgender creative processes. Most importantly, scholars are beginning to discern communities of male and female writers and heterosocial intertextual lineages, thereby suggesting synchronic and diachronic patterns for integrationist historiography.In or about 2000, female character changed. No longer was gender the dominant concept for understanding women's lives and works. Gender binaries dissolved, together with the opposition of a male public and a female private sphere. The borderline between male and female literature began to fade as well. With regard to 18th-century studies, the general doubt concerning the validity of exclusively gender-determined accounts was reinforced by the conjecture that, at least as far as the first 50 or 60 years of the century are concerned, the supposed primacy of gender duality might be the result of an anachronistic projection of the later 'two-sex model' back onto an earlier age. Recent studies on women writers prefer to work with traditionally masculine descriptive and interpretative categories, which in the process gradually lose their gender-specific character. Scholars discover the importance of female 'agency'. They realize that women competed with men for public recognition and financial gain in the literary marketplace, discussed 'male' topics such as politics, economics, philosophy, religion and history, and worked successfully in genres other than the 'feminine' novel. Their literary activities were closely connected with those of their male colleagues. The integrationist move of women's studies is made explicit in books and articles, which explore the similarities and interrelations between male and female authors. These open up to visions of heterosocial writing communities. Taken together, the studies lay the ground work for a future integrationist literary historiography.My review of research builds on Betty A. Schellenberg's 2007 article "Writing EighteenthCentury Women's Literary History, 1986 to 2006". For this reason, publications prior to 2005 are mentioned only wh...
Columbiads, epic poems written in a range of European languages (French, English, German) between 1753 and 1798 and dealing with the encounter between Columbus and native American peoples, address in a variety of ways the linguistic barriers it threw up. Often, interest in the languages of the indigenous peoples goes hand in hand with respect for their cultures. Whereas some authors minimize the language gap in order to promote an imperialist or missionary agenda, in others it is foregrounded as a manifestation of cultural alterity. The figure of a translator is introduced to personify the desire to venture into a linguistically and culturally different world, and its danger. One example, the Columbona of the Swiss-German author Johann Jacob Bodmer, 1753, goes so far as to depict European sailors and native Americans engaging together in the adventure of language learning in order to share each other’s knowledge and view of life.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.