THE OXFORD HISTORY OF LITERARY TRANSLATION IN ENGLISH
General Editors: Peter France and Stuart Gillespie
This groundbreaking five-volume history runs from the Middle Ages to the year 2000. It is a critical history, treating translations wherever appropriate as literary works in their own right, and reveals the vital part played by translators and translation in shaping the literary culture of the English-speaking world, both for writers and readers. It thus offers new and often challenging perspectives on the history of literature in English. As well as examining the translations and their wider impact, it explores the processes by which they came into being and were disseminated, and provides extensive bibliographical and biographical reference material.
In the period covered by Volume 2 comes a drive, unprecedented in its energy and scope, to bring foreign writing of all kinds into English. The humanist scholar depicted in Antonello's St Jerome, the jacket illustration, is one of the figures at work, and one of the most self-conscious and prolonged encounters that took place was with the Bible, a uniquely fraught and intimidating original. But early modern English translation often finds its setting within far busier scenes of worldly life - on the London stage, as a bid for patronage, for purposes polemical, political, hortatory, instructional, and as a way of making a living in the expanding book trade.
Translation became, as never before, a part of the English writer's career, and sometimes a whole career in itself. Translation was also fundamental in the evolution of the still unfixed English language and its still unfixed literary styles. Some translations of this period have themselves become landmarks in English literature and have exercised a profound and enduring influence on perceptions of their originals in the anglophone world; others less well-known are treated more comprehensively here than in any previous history. The entire phenomenon is documented in an extensive bibliography of literary translations of the period, the most comprehensive ever compiled. The work of our early modern translators, with all its energy, is not always scholarly or even always convincing. But after this era is over English translation never again feels quite so urgent or contentious.

Newly Recovered English Classical Translations, 1600-1800 is a unique resource: a volume presenting for the first time a wide-ranging collection of never-before-printed English translations from ancient Greek and Latin verse and drama of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Transcribed and edited from surviving manuscripts, these translations open a window onto a period in which the full richness and diversity of engagement with classical texts through translation is only now becoming apparent. Upwards of 100 identified translators and many more anonymous writers are included, from familiar and sometimes eminent figures to the obscure and unknown. Since very few of them expected their work to be printed, these translators often felt free to experiment, innovate, or subvert established norms. Their productions thus shed new light on how their source texts could be read. As English verse they hold their ground remarkably well against the printed translations of the time, and regularly surpass them. The more than 300 translations included here, from epigrams to (selections from) epics, are richly informative about the reception of classical poetry and drama in this crucial period, copiously augmenting and sometimes challenging the narratives suggested by the more familiar record of printed translations. This edition will prove to have far-reaching implications for the history both of classical reception and of English translation - a phenomenon central to English literary endeavour for much of this era.

While much has been written on Shakespeare's debt to the classical tradition, less has been said about his roots in the popular culture of his own time. This is the first book to explore the full range of his debts to Elizabethan popular culture. Topics covered include the mystery plays, festive custom, clowns, romance and popular fiction, folklore and superstition, everyday sayings, and popular songs. These essays show how Shakespeare, throughout his dramatic work, used popular culture. A final chapter, which considers ballads with Shakespearean connections in the seventeenth century, shows how popular culture immediately after his time used Shakespeare.

This groundbreaking five-volume history runs from the Middle Ages to the year 2000. It is a critical history, treating translations wherever appropriate as literary works in their own right, and reveals the vital part played by translators and translation in shaping the literary culture of the English-speaking world, both for writers and readers. It thus offers new and often challenging perspectives on the history of literature in English. As well as examining the translations and their wider impact, it explores the processes by which they came into being and were disseminated, and provides extensive bibliographical and biographical reference material.
Volume 3 of the Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, the first of the five to appear, lies at the chronological center of the History, and explores in full breadth both the rich tradition of translated literature in English, and its centrality to the "native" tradition.
Quite independently of their wider impact, the translations of the age of Dryden and Pope, Behn and Smart, Macpherson and Smollett in themselves command the fullest attention, and Volume 3 explores their intrinsic interest as fully-fledged English literary works. In this period, translation--particularly from Latin, Greek, and French--acts as a constant point of reference and a crucial shaping force in English writing. It is an era in which key literary innovations--the heroic couplet, the sublime, primitivism--are fostered, and sometimes directly occasioned, by translation as a discipline and by translations as models. This volume also attends, therefore, to the influence of translation on forms and styles used in the wider literary arena, and itscontribution to conceptions of the English literary canon (for which this period was formative).
Volume 3 draws on the work of thirty-two contributors from six countries in order to deal adequately with the prolific and diffuse nature of the translation phenomenon in the 1660-1790 period, and the challenge it presents to literary scholarship as traditionally organized. To the audience it will find among scholars of English Literature and elsewhere, this complete version of a story hitherto told only piecemeal will be a revelation. This volume proposes a map of the period completely different from those drawn in other modern literary histories, a map in which boundaries between "original" and translated work in publishers' output, in readers' experience, in writers' oeuvres, and in the English literary achievement as a whole are redrawn--or erased--at a stroke. What is more, it demonstrates that such a view of English literature was predominant within the period itself.

Lucretius' didactic poem De rerum natura ('On the Nature of Things') is an impassioned and visionary presentation of the materialist philosophy of Epicurus, and one of the most powerful poetic texts of antiquity. After its rediscovery in 1417 it became a controversial and seminal work in successive phases of literary history, the history of science, and the Enlightenment. In this 2007 Cambridge Companion experts in the history of literature, philosophy and science discuss the poem in its ancient contexts and in its reception both as a literary text and as a vehicle for progressive ideas. The Companion is designed both as an accessible handbook for the general reader who wishes to learn about Lucretius, and as a series of stimulating essays for students of classical antiquity and its reception. It is completely accessible to the reader who has only read Lucretius in translation.

Lucretius' didactic poem De rerum natura ('On the Nature of Things') is an impassioned and visionary presentation of the materialist philosophy of Epicurus, and one of the most powerful poetic texts of antiquity. After its rediscovery in 1417 it became a controversial and seminal work in successive phases of literary history, the history of science, and the Enlightenment. In this 2007 Cambridge Companion experts in the history of literature, philosophy and science discuss the poem in its ancient contexts and in its reception both as a literary text and as a vehicle for progressive ideas. The Companion is designed both as an accessible handbook for the general reader who wishes to learn about Lucretius, and as a series of stimulating essays for students of classical antiquity and its reception. It is completely accessible to the reader who has only read Lucretius in translation.

This encyclopedia-style Dictionary is a comprehensive reference guide to Shakespeare's literary knowledge and recent scholarship on it. Nearly 200 entries cover the full range of literary writing Shakespeare was acquainted with, and which influenced his own work, including classical, historical, religious and contemporary works. It provides an overview of his use of authors such as Virgil, Chaucer, Erasmus, Marlowe and Samuel Daniel, whose influence is across the canon. Other entries cover anonymous or collective works such as the Bible, Emblems, Homilies, Chronicle History plays and the Morality tradition in drama. Entries cover writers and works whose importance to Shakespeare has emerged more clearly in recent years due to new research. Others describe and explain current thinking on long-recognized sources such as Plutarch, Ovid, Holinshed, Ariosto and Montaigne. Entries for all major sources, over 80 in number, feature surveys of the writer's place in Shakespeare's time, detailed discussion of the relationship to Shakespeare's plays and poems, and full bibliography. Sample passages from writers and texts of early modern England allow the volume to be used also as a reader in the literature commonly known in Shakespeare's era; these excerpts, together with reproductions of pages and illustrations from the original texts, convey the flavour of the material as Shakespeare would have encountered it. Now available in paperback and with a new Preface bringing the book up-to-date, this is an invaluable reference tool for anyone interested in the literary influences and sources which fed and inspired Shakespeare's work.

This collection is a facsimile reprint of the initial publication of the Tonson miscellanies (in the first four of which Dryden played a prominent role as contributor, editorial adviser, and recruiter of contributors). In 1679 the enterprising young publisher Jacob Tonson entered into a business relationship with John Dryden, the most eminent English poet of the late seventeenth century. This was to last until Dryden's death in 1700, by which time Tonson was well established as the major English literary publisher of his day. Jacob Tonson (the Elder) has been called 'the first modern publisher'. One of the keystones of his publishing enterprises was the series of verse miscellanies of which the first editions appeared between 1684 and 1709. Unlike some later collections, these were not compilations of previously-published material, but of new work commissioned or collected expressly for these volumes by Tonson and - until his death - Dryden. As the label implies, their appeal was partly that of variety: they each contained many (50-110) mostly short poems in a wide range of genres, including topical satires, theatrical prologues and epilogues, songs, personal poems, and especially translations from the more accessible Latin and Greek classics (see sample contents lists in Appendix). They achieved immediate success, long-term popularity, and an extremely influential role in forming the tastes of readers and the practices of writers. Today, the miscellanies provide crucial insight into the development of English poetry at the beginning of the Long Eighteenth Century. Early volumes print work by such poets as Sir Charles Sedley, Rochester, Aphra Behn, and Thomas Rymer. The middle volumes see the emergence of a new generation of younger writers, many of them proteges of Dryden, including Joseph Addison, William Congreve, and Matthew Prior. The final volumes include some of the earliest work of Alexander Pope, Nicholas Rowe, and Jonathan Swift. The miscellanies represent a wide spectrum of political affiliations, and include work by, and addressed to, women. The Tonson miscellanies thus provide a unique decade-by-decade record of the complex transition between the 'Restoration' and 'Augustan' (or more neutrally seventeenth to eighteenth-century) phases of English literary culture.