The Inheritors and The Nature of a Crime

This volume offers scholars the first authoritative text of two works produced collaboratively by two of the most important modern British novelists. Long hard to obtain and frequently neglected by critics, each can now be appreciated both in its own right and as part of the two authors' individual oeuvres. This scholarly edition situates both works in the context of the writers' meeting and ongoing collaboration, providing illuminating literary and historical references and detailing the works' composition history and reception in the UK and America. As well as establishing definitive texts of both works and of the authors' prefaces written for the 1924 republication of The Nature of a Crime, this edition also includes Ford's own 1924 account of his collaboration with Conrad on The Inheritors, as well as the text of Ford's 'The Old Story', a hitherto unpublished early draft of the basic plot of The Nature of a Crime.

«I often thought if it could not be dissolved, it could only with life be extirpated»: a translemic analysis and Spanish translation of Frances Burney’s Letter from Frances Burney to her sister Esther about her mastectomy without anaesthetic, 1812

Frances Burney (1752-1840) was one of the most influential eighteenth-century British novelists. Apart from the novel, Burney also cultivated the theatre and she wrote texts of a marked political nature on the French Revolution, a fact that is not so well– known by the general public. This article is inscribed within the framework of gender studies and the so-called Burney Studies and aims to analyze Letter from Frances Burney to Her Sister Esther About her Mastectomy Without Anaesthetic, 1812. By its subject, the document is an account of current interest for both medicine and feminism. Here Letter Here Letter is studied from the perspective of translation studies, specifically taking Itamar Even-Zohar’s theory of literary polisystems and various translation strategies as a methodological reference. We will examine the configuration of the key elements of Even-Zohar’s approach and various translation strategies as a methodological reference in this text which we will approach translation studies as a pathography, insisting on the identification between female subject and writing, Burney’s courage in confronting the disease and the particular relationship she establishes with the participants in the story and the impact that disease has on those around and helping her. Finally, the Spanish translation of Letter is offered, so Spanish-speaking readers have access to this document recently digitized by The British Library. Letter is a chronicle of pain, but also of courage and a real lesson in the intimate relationship between women and writing that was always so important to Burney. This study also means a re-vision of the writer that is far from what we could have until now.

Rose Macaulay and Propaganda

The novelist Rose Macaulay (1881–1958) had direct professional experience of Britain's secret propaganda operation during the First World War. She was among the first British novelists to take propaganda seriously as a subject for fiction, and wrote insightfully about its methods and its social implications. Moreover, her long career illuminates both the continuity and the development of the British state's clandestine efforts to shape public opinion at home and abroad, from the beginnings of systematic, state-directed propaganda in the First World War to the more diffuse strategies of early Cold War anti-communism. Despite her close connections to propaganda in both world wars, however – and notwithstanding the interest her fiction very frequently takes in the worlds of official information, disinformation, and espionage – Macaulay has hardly figured in recent scholarship on the links between literature and national information systems. This article argues that Macaulay approached the challenge of reconciling propaganda and literature differently from many of her modernist contemporaries, refusing to abandon the idea of fiction as a persuasive and socially-engaged form of imaginative writing. If this position made her an outlier in the climate of reaction against propaganda which followed the First World War, it would, by the early years of the Cold War, seem much more tenable. In its first half, the article establishes Macaulay's bona fides as a participant in Britain's wartime propaganda establishment, and describes the impression this experience left on her early fiction. It then turns to Macaulay's final novel, The Towers of Trebizond, in which religious propaganda and anti-communist rhetoric combine, to great comic effect, in the febrile atmosphere of the Cold War middle east.

Old Age as Horror Vision or Comfort Zone in the Late Fiction of Contemporary British Novelists

Old people have always figured in literature, but the unprecedented and worldwide growth of longevity in the twentieth century has triggered new fictional approaches to the topic of aging. Thus, since the late 1980 s, an ever growing number of established British writers, reaching their own advanced years, have written on age from an insider’s perspective, creating old main characters and focusing on their mental and physical experiences. I have examined six of such novels, published between 1986 and 2019, trying to find out how the authors construct their heroes’ and heroines’ aging selves by imagining their attitudes to certain central issues like time, death, physical decay and human relationships. Of the classical formative categories (gender, class, ethnicity, etc.) gender has proved to be the most essential, especially when it comes to the perspectives on time. While the view of heroes created by male writers remains fixed on the past, often with nostalgia, sometimes with regret, the women authors’ heroines focus on their present situation with a view to the future, represented by children and grandchildren. Class turned out to be a second important category: the (uncontemplated) safe middle-class position of all protagonists appears as an indispensable precondition for the free choice of attitude to the challenges of aging.

The Translation and Reception of Virginia Woolf in Romania (1926–89)

This chapter reviews the history of the reception and translation of Virginia Woolf’s works in Romania during the interwar period, the early 1940s, and the communist era (1945—1989), with a special focus on the reception of Orlando: A Biography in Vera Călin’s 1968 translation. It begins with a discussion of the earliest reviews of Woolf’s works and the first translations of her fiction, pointing out that during the interwar period Romanian critics considered Woolf to be part of a generation of British novelists who sought to push the limits of the genre and experiment with its language and form in ways that were similar to their own. Everything changed after 1945, when reviews and translations of Woolf and other Western authors came to a halt under the newly instituted communist regime and Soviet occupation. Translations began to flourish again starting in 1968, in a system that, paradoxically, both encouraged and censored them. It is this relationship between translation and censorship that the last part of this chapter examines, revealing interconnections of text and image, co-optation and subversion, original and translation.

Conrad, Joseph (1857–1924)

Joseph Conrad was one of the foremost British novelists of the modernist period. Many of the narrative innovations he developed appeared a decade or more before similar technical experimentation became the norm among modernist writers. Furthermore, his radical skepticism was a stark contrast to the Edwardian optimism evident in the years prior to the First World War and anticipates the disillusionment so many modernist writers felt during the post-war era. Best known for ‘Heart of Darkness’, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, ‘The Secret Sharer’, and Under Western Eyes, Conrad influenced numerous writers who followed him, such as William Faulkner, Graham Greene, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and an entire generation of African writers who often found themselves in dialogue with Conrad {-} for example, Chinua Achebe and J. M. Coetzee.