Displaying items by tag: comparative literature

“I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read," a third reader says, "but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. [...]”

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller

If reading and comparing, interpretation and translation are regular keywords in our discipline, re-reading is a concept that goes often unexplored, even though it endows them all with new and enhanced meaning. That ‘re’ necessarily asks us to position that reading and its repetition (or repetitions) within time and space: in the short term, re-reading is essential to any intensive, critical engagement with text; but re-reading in the longer term entails revisiting more than just text – it means an active comparison between now and then, necessarily locating ourselves within that action and renegotiating both cultural and personal awareness. Re-reading can take different forms as it happens over time, sometimes a seasonal or cyclical action to find something familiar – yet never quite the same – sometimes taking the shape of cumulative, palimpsestic reading. And what if we extend that act of reading outside of ourselves, and choose to read and understand with others, inscribing our own interpretive effort within a history of reading? We become part of an interpretive community where reading and re-reading – across time and space, borders and languages, cultures and media – contribute to a tapestry of meaning.

We invite contributions for posters and 15-minute papers that build on the concept of re-reading to reflect on themes including, though not limited to, the following:

• material expressions of re-reading
• comparing re-readings of the same text
• fictional representations of re-reading
• re-reading as emotion
• translation and re-translation
• adaptation and transformations of texts across media
• re-appropriation of texts, canons, histories
• intergenerational and diachronic acts of re-reading
• rewriting as re-reading
• re-reading and decoloniality
• dystopia as re-reading

Please send proposals of around 200 words to <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.;, including your name, affiliation, and a brief biography by 3 March 2025. All participants will be notified by 14 March 2025. Attendance is free and the conference will be hybrid. Our keynote speaker this year will be Professor David Damrosch (Institute for World Literature, Harvard University).

Space and spatiality have been significant coordinates in the study of translation in the West. The concept has long been included in humanities and social sciences too by scholars like Edward Soja (1989); Warf & Arias (2009). This panel aims to question how the concept of “geo” features in translation and analyse translation as a point of intersection and relationality that redefines our concepts of spatial axis and territorial coordinates. This panel will try to bring in disciplines of geometry and geography to the terrain of translation studies and thus include alternative models to expand the field. The etymological origin of ‘geometry’ traces back to the Greek word geometria or “measurement of earth or land”. Similarly ‘geography’ originates from Greek word geographia which means “description of the earth's surface”. The prefix trans- of ‘translation’ means ‘to go beyond’, ‘on the other side’. Thus, when taken together, translation from the geographical and geometrical perspective alludes to the question of movement in terms of land or space. If we take the model of Euclidean Geometry, then the western concept of translational act as a spatial flow can be understood from a geometrical angle as a process of distance-preserving/distance-altering transformation between two metrical/geographical spaces. Again, translation, as a political activity, determines how communities are mapped by their cultural other and as such points out how the binaries of the centre and periphery construct our worldviews based on asymmetrical power relations. Michael Cronin (2000), while exploring the relationship between translation and geographical spaces, has meticulously considered movement both in the context of territorial and narrative space and analysed it through the lens of language. Federico Italiano (2016) has examined how Western spatial imaginations constructed through literary works have been translated across languages, media and epochs and created the idea of the world through cultural differences.

This book investigates the English translations and adaptations of the sixteenth century classic Chinese novel Jin Ping Mei. Acclaimed the ‘No.1 Marvellous Book’ of the Ming dynasty, Jin Ping Mei was banned soon after its appearance, due to the inclusion of graphically explicit sexual descriptions. So far there have been more than a dozen English adaptations and translations of the novel.

Working within the framework of descriptive translation studies, this book provides a translational history of the English versions of Jin Ping Mei, supported by various paratexts, including book covers, reviews, and archival materials. It also conducts textual comparisons to uncover the translation norms at work in the only two complete renditions, namely The Golden Lotus by Clement Egerton and The Plum in the Golden Vase by David Roy. The notions of agency, habitus and capital are introduced for the examination of the transference of linguistic, literary and cultural aspects of the two translations.

The book represents the first systematic research effort on the English Translations of Jin Ping Mei. Given its pioneering status and interdisciplinary nature, the data, structure and findings of this book will potentially enrich the fields of Translation Studies, Comparative Literature, Chinese Studies, Cultural Studies and Book History.

This book investigates the English translations and adaptations of the sixteenth century classic Chinese novel Jin Ping Mei. Acclaimed the ‘No.1 Marvellous Book’ of the Ming dynasty, Jin Ping Mei was banned soon after its appearance, due to the inclusion of graphically explicit sexual descriptions. So far there have been more than a dozen English adaptations and translations of the novel.

Working within the framework of descriptive translation studies, this book provides a translational history of the English versions of Jin Ping Mei, supported by various paratexts, including book covers, reviews, and archival materials. It also conducts textual comparisons to uncover the translation norms at work in the only two complete renditions, namely The Golden Lotus by Clement Egerton and The Plum in the Golden Vase by David Roy. The notions of agency, habitus and capital are introduced for the examination of the transference of linguistic, literary and cultural aspects of the two translations.

The book represents the first systematic research effort on the English Translations of Jin Ping Mei. Given its pioneering status and interdisciplinary nature, the data, structure and findings of this book will potentially enrich the fields of Translation Studies, Comparative Literature, Chinese Studies, Cultural Studies and Book History.