Didactismo y moralidad en la labor de traducción de Joaquina García Balmaseda (1837-1911)

Joaquina García Balmaseda (1837-1911) es hoy en día una escritora conocida por sus contribuciones a la literatura y el periodismo de mediados del siglo XIX. Existen muchas referencias a su producción literaria y a sus colaboraciones en revistas femeninas de la época, diseminadas en artículos y capítulos de libros; sin embargo, su labor como traductora no ha sido tan estudiada. El inmenso catálogo de traducciones de Balmaseda pone de relieve la importancia que tuvo esta parcela en su propia obra y, a la vez, muestra cómo contribuyó a divulgar los escritores europeos más importantes de su tiempo (George Sand, Paul Féval, Alexandre Dumas y Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens y Mary Elizabeth Braddon entre otros). García Balmaseda ejerció un papel muy importante como mediadora cultural, sobre todo, en La Correspondencia de España (1860-1925), revista en la que colaboró asiduamente con sus traducciones. Destaca la inmediatez con la que tradujo las obras, lo dificultoso que resultaba trasladar y acortar novelas de grandes dimensiones para acomodarlas a la prensa. Ahora bien, sus convicciones ideológicas se hallan en el germen de sus producciones literarias y de traducción. En estas, suprime partes que no considera apropiadas para el lector de la época; modifica el argumento y lo acomoda para que forme parte de esa «literatura edificante» tan propia de la época isabelina. En la mayoría de los casos, las supresiones o cambios afectan a cuestiones políticas, morales y religiosas, a expresiones contrarias a la tradición, matrimonio, familia o valores de la patria.

Knighthoods and Empty Benches: Wilkie Collins’s Armadale and the Late Victorian Culture Industry

In locating Wilkie Collins’s novel Armadale (1866) in the context of its two subsequent dramatic versions, this article considers how the Victorian culture industry contended with an aggressively expanding market economy. It positions Collins’s work amid an ongoing Victorian debate that was especially prevalent in literary and dramatic periodicals concerning the bifurcated development of English drama and novels. Highlighting how Collins flexibly adapted his writing for the stage in the face of legal, commercial, and artistic pressures strengthens emerging links between the ostensibly discrete fields of novelistic and theatrical writing. The adaptation of novels for the stage is one of the primary areas where developing intellectual property law collided with cultural production, opening up, for writers such as Collins, new avenues to write, produce, and entertain. This article aims to expand on recent studies of the evolving nature of copyright law in the nineteenth century by considering the forms of cultural production that context facilitated. Considering the legal context of these adaptations in concert with, however, and not as ancillary to or separate from, their social and political valences highlights the modes of production that arose despite – or perhaps as a result of – the opaque nature of Victorian intellectual property laws. Wilkie Collins the successful dramatist, as opposed to Wilkie Collins the novelist writing for the stage, emerged in his own right partly due to the copyright contests that initially encouraged him to adapt his novels in the first place.

The Letters in the Story

The long tradition of mixta-genera fiction, particularly favoured by women novelists, which combined fully-transcribed letters and third-person narrative has been largely overlooked in literary criticism. Working with recognized formal conventions and typical thematic concerns, Tavor Bannet demonstrates how narrative-epistolary novels opposed the real, situated, transactional and instrumental character of letters, with their multi-lateral relationships and temporally shifting readings, to merely documentary uses of letters in history and law. Analyzing issues of reading and misreading, knowledge and ignorance, communication and credulity, this study investigates how novelists adapted familiar romance plots centred on mysteries of identity to test the viability of empiricism's new culture of fact and challenge positivism's later all-pervading regime of truth. Close reading of narrative-epistolary novels by authors ranging from Aphra Behn and Charlotte Lennox to Frances Burney and Wilkie Collins tracks transgenerational debates, bringing to light both what Victorians took from their eighteenth-century forbears and what they changed.

"A Strange Fever of the Nerves and Blood": Nervous Illness in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century

<p>In the nineteenth century, the discussion of personal health and wellbeing became almost a national pastime. With publications such as the British Medical Journal and Lancet freely accessible to the everyday reader, common medical terms and diagnoses were readily absorbed by the public. In particular, the nineteenth century saw the rapid rise of the ‘nervous illness’ – sicknesses which had no apparent physical cause, but had the capacity to cripple their victims with (among other things) delirium, tremors and convulsions. As part of the rich social life of this popular class of disorder, writers of fiction within the nineteenth century also participated in the public dialogue on the subject. Authors such as Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle all constructed narratives involving nervous sufferers, particularly hypochondriacs and victims of brain fever. Despite writing in a wide variety of genres ranging from Gothic to realist, the roles played by the illnesses within the texts of these authors remain a vital feature of the plot, either as a hindrance to the protagonists (by removing key players from the plot at a critical moment) or a method of revealing deeper aspects of their character. Nervous illnesses carried with them social stigmas: men could be rendered feminine; women could be branded recklessly passionate or even considered visionaries as ideas about the nerves, the supposed seat of emotion and passion, brought into sharp relief the boundaries between physical and mental suffering, and physical and spiritual experiences. The central aim of this thesis is to examine the cultural understanding of nervous illness and how nineteenth-century texts interacted with and challenged this knowledge. It focuses on how nineteenth-century authors of different genres – particularly the Gothic, sensation and realist genres – use the common convention of nervous illness – particularly hypochondria and brain fever – to develop their protagonists and influence the plot. Through comparisons between literary symptoms and those recorded by contemporary sufferers and their physicians, this thesis analyses the way that the cultural concept of nervous illness is used by four principal Victorian authors across a range of their works, looking at how hypochondria and brain fever function within their plots and interact with gender and genre conventions to uphold and subvert the common tropes of each. Whether it aids or hinders the protagonist, or merely gives the reader an insight into their personality, nervous illness in the Victorian novel was a widely used convention which speaks not only of the mindset of the author, but also of the public which so willingly received it.</p>

"A Strange Fever of the Nerves and Blood": Nervous Illness in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century

<p>In the nineteenth century, the discussion of personal health and wellbeing became almost a national pastime. With publications such as the British Medical Journal and Lancet freely accessible to the everyday reader, common medical terms and diagnoses were readily absorbed by the public. In particular, the nineteenth century saw the rapid rise of the ‘nervous illness’ – sicknesses which had no apparent physical cause, but had the capacity to cripple their victims with (among other things) delirium, tremors and convulsions. As part of the rich social life of this popular class of disorder, writers of fiction within the nineteenth century also participated in the public dialogue on the subject. Authors such as Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle all constructed narratives involving nervous sufferers, particularly hypochondriacs and victims of brain fever. Despite writing in a wide variety of genres ranging from Gothic to realist, the roles played by the illnesses within the texts of these authors remain a vital feature of the plot, either as a hindrance to the protagonists (by removing key players from the plot at a critical moment) or a method of revealing deeper aspects of their character. Nervous illnesses carried with them social stigmas: men could be rendered feminine; women could be branded recklessly passionate or even considered visionaries as ideas about the nerves, the supposed seat of emotion and passion, brought into sharp relief the boundaries between physical and mental suffering, and physical and spiritual experiences. The central aim of this thesis is to examine the cultural understanding of nervous illness and how nineteenth-century texts interacted with and challenged this knowledge. It focuses on how nineteenth-century authors of different genres – particularly the Gothic, sensation and realist genres – use the common convention of nervous illness – particularly hypochondria and brain fever – to develop their protagonists and influence the plot. Through comparisons between literary symptoms and those recorded by contemporary sufferers and their physicians, this thesis analyses the way that the cultural concept of nervous illness is used by four principal Victorian authors across a range of their works, looking at how hypochondria and brain fever function within their plots and interact with gender and genre conventions to uphold and subvert the common tropes of each. Whether it aids or hinders the protagonist, or merely gives the reader an insight into their personality, nervous illness in the Victorian novel was a widely used convention which speaks not only of the mindset of the author, but also of the public which so willingly received it.</p>

The Victorian Period

This chapter has five sections: 1. General and Prose, including Dickens; 2. The Novel; 3. Poetry; 4. Periodicals, Publishing History, and Drama; 5. Miscellaneous. Section 1 is by Ana Alicia Garza; section 2 is by Lois Burke; section 3 is by Sally Blackburn-Daniels; sections 4 and 5 are by William Baker. In somewhat of a departure from previous accounts, this chapter concludes with a mixed-genre section that covers Samuel Butler Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, George Gissing, Richard Jefferies, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope. This is followed by a section containing additional materials that came too late to be included elsewhere. These sections have been contributed by William Baker, who thanks for their assistance Dominic Edwards, Olaf Berwald, Beth Palmer, Sophie Ratcliffe, and Caroline Radcliffe.

Alternative Visions Of Crime And Community In Wilkie Collins' The Woman In White And The Moonstone

When T. S. Eliot described Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) as the “first and greatest of English detective novels” (413), he could not have predicted the number of writers who would take issue with his brief phrase. While some have embraced Eliot’s adjectives (Bisla; Hennelly), others have critiqued the “first” and “greatest” descriptors, identifying Collins’ predecessors (Duncan; Klimaszewski), and contemporaries who offer The Moonstone some competition for the title of “greatest” (Smillie; Thomas). Still others have taken issue with defining the novel as “English,” due to its anti-Imperialist critiques (Narayan; Roy). Following in the footsteps of scholars such as Tamar Heller and D. A. Miller, the descriptor I choose to trouble in this essay is “detective.” Though The Moonstone inarguably contains a detective character, and a complex mystery that is indeed solved through detection, I argue that, especially when viewed in conjunction with Collins’ earlier novel The Woman in White (1859), Collins should be understood not as establishing the conventions of the detective novel to come, but as working against the tide of a developing genre which became increasingly police- and law-focused. Rather than valorizing the police detective or reifying the justness of the legal system, these novels articulate a vision of crime and justice outside of the boundaries of law and policing, one markedly different from the “detective” genre Eliot credits Collins with founding.

Alternative Visions Of Crime And Community In Wilkie Collins' The Woman In White And The Moonstone

When T. S. Eliot described Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) as the “first and greatest of English detective novels” (413), he could not have predicted the number of writers who would take issue with his brief phrase. While some have embraced Eliot’s adjectives (Bisla; Hennelly), others have critiqued the “first” and “greatest” descriptors, identifying Collins’ predecessors (Duncan; Klimaszewski), and contemporaries who offer The Moonstone some competition for the title of “greatest” (Smillie; Thomas). Still others have taken issue with defining the novel as “English,” due to its anti-Imperialist critiques (Narayan; Roy). Following in the footsteps of scholars such as Tamar Heller and D. A. Miller, the descriptor I choose to trouble in this essay is “detective.” Though The Moonstone inarguably contains a detective character, and a complex mystery that is indeed solved through detection, I argue that, especially when viewed in conjunction with Collins’ earlier novel The Woman in White (1859), Collins should be understood not as establishing the conventions of the detective novel to come, but as working against the tide of a developing genre which became increasingly police- and law-focused. Rather than valorizing the police detective or reifying the justness of the legal system, these novels articulate a vision of crime and justice outside of the boundaries of law and policing, one markedly different from the “detective” genre Eliot credits Collins with founding.

Intertextual dialogue with Victorian literature in the novels by Sarah Ann Waters as a means of implementing feminist issues

The article presents an analysis of the implementation of the category of intertextuality in the novel «Affinity» (1999) by the British writer Sarah Ann Waters. The aim of the work was to trace how the intertextual dialogue with the Victorian literature contributes to the formation of the feminist issues of the work. It is revealed that the main pretexts when creating a novel for Waters were «Little Dorrit» by Charles John Huffam Dickens, «Aurora Leigh» by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, «The Turn of the Screw» by Henry James, and novels by William Wilkie Collins. «Affinity» has elements of Gothic narrative, a detective, a sensational novel, the Newgate novel, picaresque novel, contributing to the formation of women's issues. The dialogue with Victorianism allows Waters to raise issues of gender inequality in the past and present, the exploitation of women, and the rights of individuals to realise their sexual identity. For Waters, turning to Victorianism is a way to draw attention to issues that, according to the writer, are still topical in British culture, such as sexuality, class and gender.