De género y de géneros: Victoria Ocampo, traductora de Colette: “Gigi”

Victoria Ocampo has been an agent of hybridization in Argentinean literature, acting as a bridge that has fostered the exchange of literary ideas between Argentina, Europe and the United States. This is precisely what she did with her translation of Gigi, by Colette. In this essay we aim at the study of the many ties, parallels, and overlaps existing between Ocampo and Colette

De género y de géneros: Victoria Ocampo, traductora de Colette: “Gigi”

Victoria Ocampo has been an agent of hybridization in Argentinean literature, acting as a bridge that has fostered the exchange of literary ideas between Argentina, Europe and the United States. This is precisely what she did with her translation of Gigi, by Colette. In this essay we aim at the study of the many ties, parallels, and overlaps existing between Ocampo and Colette

“An appreciative and grateful author”: Edith Wharton and the House of Macmillan

This essay is the first piece of scholarship to examine the relationship between the expatriate American novelist Edith Wharton (1862-1937) and her chief British publisher, Macmillan and Co. Entirely original analysis draws extensively upon the author/publisher correspondence held in the Macmillan Archive in the British Library, and challenges existing readings of the firm's handling of women novelists in the period 1900-1930

Small and Large Cultures: Individuality, the Collective, Conformity and the Period of the Cold War

The Cold War is something I analyze in two parts.  First, I examine its politics, including political literatures and cultures large and small that concentrate on central concerns of the Cold War. Second, I discuss small and minor literatures in the period of the Cold War in theory and practice, including examples from the Netherlands and Canada that are in the period of the Cold War but do not focus on it as its primary concern or theme.  In these sections,  I argue for the centrality of the tension between tyranny and liberty, individual and the group, conformity and nonconformity and related matters. The article ranges in the politics of the Cold War from the background of Marx and Mill though Churchill, Stalin,  Truman, McCarthy to Russell, Grant and Ignatieff.  In literature, that is the Cold War in ink,  the essay analyzes Orwell’s essay on the nuclear bomb and his novels,  Nineteen Eighty-four and Animal Farm as well as  Miller’s play, The Crucible and a poem by Einstein on Russell.  I concentrate on examples of Dutch fiction and their translation into English  and a Canadian novel,  The Weekend Man, by Richard B. Wright,   because they are an element of  “minority literatures.”   Besides  exploring the Cold War, I  briefly examine theories of minor or small literatures, including some aspects of the views of Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari

Translation in distraction : on Eileen Chang’s “Chinese translation: a vehicle of cultural influence”

This essay focuses on a previously obscure and only recently republished English text held at USC that offers an unparalleled window into Chang’s engagement with translation. The untitled manuscript, typed with handwritten additions and corrections, is contained in a folder marked “Untitled article or speech” and appears to be the script of an oral presentation in which Chang surveys the development of translation in China from the late-Qing period, through the 1911 revolution, the May Fourth period, the war with Japan, the 1949 revolution and the Cultural Revolution. Her speech emphasizes how translation functioned as an index to China’s fraught relationship with the outside world, particularly the West (including Japan and Russia); to that end, the text engages with historical movements such as imperialism, modernization, and the ideological polarization of the Cold War, resulting in an account that belies her reputation as an apolitical figure. While the rediscovery of a text by Eileen Chang is certainly a matter of anecdotal interest, the purpose of this essay is not only to reconstruct its history but also to consider how it illuminates her lifelong relationship to translation through which, I will argue, she tried to unsettle the geopolitical categories that Chih-ming Wang 王智明 (2012) has identified as foundational to modern Chinese literary culture. In what follows, I start by providing an overview of the text based on archival and other sources and provide a summary of its contents. Turning to Shuang Shen’s 沈雙 (2012) discussion of translation as impersonation, I consider how the oral address, a rare textual form in the oeuvre of a notoriously reclusive writer, involves navigating the roles of reader, author, and translator. Through this genre, Chang hints at the possibility of distancing herself from the geopolitics of translation even as the ultimate failure to do so reveals the constraints of her diasporic condition

D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover: The Changing Perspectives on Obscenity and Censorship in England and the USA

First published in 1928, D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned for thirty years because of its use of until-then taboo sexual terms. This study aims to analyze the novel’s obscenity and censorship in England and the United States of America. The obscenity trials both in England and the USA resulted in “Not Guilty” verdict, and the novel gained its freedom to publish. While censorship of Lady Chatterley’s Lover prohibited the novel from legal appearance in the U.S.A. and the U.K. for more than thirty years, it helps to promote its literary reputation, constructs the social meaning of the novel, and provides an example of the changing perspectives on obscenity in literary works. Key words: obscenity, censorshi

‘The face of evil’ : gothic biofiction and figures of enduring terror in a post-9/11 world

In this article, I show that the Gothic’s preoccupation with appearances is a rhetorical and narrative device that can be traced throughout the immediate post-9/11 period and the military campaigns that followed in both non-fiction and fiction texts. Through my analysis of two works of fiction by Martin Amis and Judith Thompson, I argue that physical appearance was employed as a marker of evil intent in order to obscure the political and territorial intentions of the Bush Administration and the American military in Afghanistan and Iraq. Further, I contend that the persistent effect of two “faces of evil” is evident through the ongoing American preoccupation with the appearance and capacity of the Other to inflict terror, which becomes an unconscious act of self-recognition.peer-reviewe