Publications

Publication details [#20718]

Publication type
Article in jnl/bk
Publication language
English

Abstract

The Victorian period in Britain is well known for its policing of morality in cultural production. Although there was no institutional prior censorship of printed works, books were frequently expurgated. Translations of classic works constitute a useful object of study because “classic” status protected even notorious works to some extent, and their freedom from copyright allowed for frequent republication. Source texts whose content contravened target-culture norms were expurgated to different extents for different readerships, illustrating, it is argued here, W. Phillips Davison’s (1983) third-person effect hypothesis. This chapter takes a set of six translations published as “Extra Volumes” to Bohn’s Standard Library and traces re-editions and retranslations of the same texts through the second half of the nineteenth century with a view to exploring the range of censoring practices deployed in Victorian translation publishing The example of Boccaccio’s Decameron illustrates these practices in action.
Source : Based on abstract in book