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Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking literary realism in comparative perspectives
Edited by Dirk Göttsche, Rosa Mucignat and Robert Weninger
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXII] 2021
► pp. 231–244

Realism and translation

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre for an Austro-Hungarian minority and beyond

Drawing on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), I first show how the Victorian novel processes translation out of the narrative in order to espouse the metonymic imperative of realism. While this may be how the relation of realism and translation is decided in the Victorian novel, I argue that the subsequent history of translation of Brontë’s novel remains inflected in this relation. Taking Croatian translations of Jane Eyre as a case study, I analyze the ways in which they remain predicated on the metonymic imperative of realism, first in Austria-Hungary, when metonymy on these terms was adopted by Austro-Hungarian minorities as a vehicle of modern self-definition, and then in a process that survives the historical Austria-Hungary well into the twentieth century, in Yugoslav modernity for instance. What these translations ultimately sustain, and reveal, is radical realism: not a poetics so much as an apparatus instrumental to negotiating the modern condition in the past two centuries.
Keywords: realism, translation, metonymy, the Victorian novel, Austria-Hungary, Croatian literature
Article outline
  • 1.Translation and the education of the Victorian novel
  • 2. Jane Eyre in Austria-Hungary, en route to Yugoslavia
  • 3.Translation, visuality and modernity on Austro-Hungarian terms
  • 4.Realism in the twentieth century: Metonymy into allegory
  • 5.Realism as radical modernity: From kinship to collectives
  • Works cited
Published online: 21 April 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxii.08juk
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