The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century (review)

This innovative study holds that translation practices "changed drastically in the eighteenth century," increased fiction's "mobility," and fostered a cosmopolitan sensibility that led the novel to operate self-consciously within and beyond national boundaries. While early eighteenth-century practices would not distinguish between source and target texts, this resistance was normal, partly because prose fiction aimed traditionally to transmit classical stories in vernacular languages. As this aim became less of a priority, translation became a cultural project that sped the emergence of the novel. Mary Helen McMurran's larger claim is that translation was "endemic" to literary culture and correlated with Enlightenment humanism and progress. At this point in the exposition, readers familiar with discourse analysis will wonder at the privileging of literariness since fiction bulked so small in the book trade output and since the classical languages remained prominent in science, medicine, the professions, and pedagogy. Another problem for literary history arises from tautological applications of literary categories. McMurran often speaks of novels and emerging novels before the novel is given either a priori or a posteriori definition. However, setting aside circularities in cause-and-effect analysis, it is an absorbing proposal that the novel grew out of a "changing mode of transmissibility," moving "from a nation-blind transfer to a transnationalized exchange."

McMurran keenly observes definitional problems, as her critique of Ian Watt's view of realism moving from English novels to "the novel form" and a universalized modernity attests. To McMurran, Watt's focus on secular clock time, which places national and novelistic identity in one conceptual field, too easily detaches the novel from earlier prose fiction and distracts attention from the plural and mixed provenance of English and French fictions. In dismissing French novels as too stylish, while maintaining that narrative authenticity depends on exhaustive representation of daily life, Watt turned his back on fiction's multilingual, protean nature. After reminding us that translation was the common denominator of earlier histories of the novel, McMurran details the conditions under which translators worked from the late seventeenth century onward: there was no standard of linguistic or stylistic fidelity; translators were independent authors; and there was systematic collusion to hide sources. The book trade circulated prose fiction without much regard to authorial and national identity. The French press mediated English fictions to Europe. The London industry, including foreign booksellers, produced foreign-language books. Exiled communities and language learners motivated publishers to exchange books across national borders. However, if translators were not hacks working on an industrial basis, conditions evolved to their disadvantage. Frances Brooke's career is illustrative: an author and book-trade agent as well as translator, she did not fit into the social networks that capital investment in the trade fostered. Competition among translators reduced their autonomy and increased their contractual responsibilities. Copyright law protected English but not foreign writers. These limitations on translators coincided with the novel's evolving procedures.

The mid-eighteenth-century textual procedures of prose fiction derive from the conflation of the tropes of amplification and abbreviation habitual to translators with the sentimental codes that led novelists across Europe to make the transmittal of feeling their chief task. Since translators treated source texts as amalgamations of elements rather than as fixed objects to be copied, they did not impose organic unity on the novel; they wanted to be free to attach readers sentimentally to characters. To McMurran, Eliza Haywood's translations with their heightened declamation and emotionalism typify the newly feminized literary production of France and England. In a fine account of La Place's translation of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko that puts Imoinda at the centre of the plot, McMurran shows how the French author softens the original novel's feelings and uses him to argue that the new novel's liberal translation procedures herald desire for its own sake and make pathos an affective agenda. This argument...