This book examines how non-fictional travel accounts were rewritten, reshaped, and reoriented in translation between 1750 and 1850, a period that saw a sudden surge in the genre's popularity. It explores how these translations played a vital role in the transmission and circulation of knowledge about foreign peoples, lands, and customs in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. The collection makes an important contribution to travel writing studies by looking beyond metaphors of mobility and cultural transfer to focus specifically on what happens to travelogues in translation. Chapters range from discussing essential differences between the original and translated text to relations between authors and translators, from intra-European narratives of Grand Tour travel to scientific voyages round the world, and from established male travellers and translators to their historically less visible female counterparts. Drawing on European travel writing in English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, the book charts how travelogues were selected for translation; how they were reworked to acquire new aesthetic, political, or gendered identities; and how they sometimes acquired a radically different character and content to meet the needs and expectations of an emergent international readership. The contributors address aesthetic, political, and gendered aspects of travel writing in translation, drawing productively on other disciplines and research areas that encompass aesthetics, the history of science, literary geography, and the history of the book.

About the Author
Alison E. Martin is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. Susan Pickford is Senior Lecturer in French to English translation at University of Paris 13, France.

Reviews

"A highly insightful collection, which by dint of its particular focus distinguishes itself clearly from other works on travel writing and starts to address an important lacuna in this field of research." --Gabriele Eichmanns, Carnegie Mellon University, German Studies Review

"A most welcome and major contribution to the study of (Enlightenment) travel writing... The authors make anyone interested in travel writing eminently aware of the need to study travel narratives in translation in order to receive a more complex and representative view of their function as vehicles of cultural mediation-and that is quite an achievement in academic terms." --Jan Borm, Universite de Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, Cercles

"Travel Narratives in Translation, 1750-1830: Nationalism, Ideology, Gender is a timely and important contribution to the continued growth of Translation Studies and catches the zeitgeist currently emerging in the field of Romantic-period studies concerning the significance of translation as the means of inter-cultural, literary and socio-political exchange." --Paul Hague, University of Wolverhampton, The BARS Review

Book Information
ISBN 9781138116849
Author Alison Martin
Format Paperback
Page Count 244
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 453g