This book examines how non-fictional travel accounts were rewritten, reshaped, and reoriented in translation between 1750 and 1850, a period that saw a sudden surge in the genre's popularity. It explores how these translations played a vital role in the transmission and circulation of knowledge about foreign peoples, lands, and customs in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. The collection makes an important contribution to travel writing studies by looking beyond metaphors of mobility and cultural transfer to focus specifically on what happens to travelogues in translation. Chapters range from discussing essential differences between the original and translated text to relations between authors and translators, from intra-European narratives of Grand Tour travel to scientific voyages round the world, and from established male travellers and translators to their historically less visible female counterparts. Drawing on European travel writing in English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, the book charts how travelogues were selected for translation; how they were reworked to acquire new aesthetic, political, or gendered identities; and how they sometimes acquired a radically different character and content to meet the needs and expectations of an emergent international readership. The contributors address aesthetic, political, and gendered aspects of travel writing in translation, drawing productively on other disciplines and research areas that encompass aesthetics, the history of science, literary geography, and the history of the book.

This book examines how non-fictional travel accounts were rewritten, reshaped, and reoriented in translation between 1750 and 1850, a period that saw a sudden surge in the genre's popularity. It explores how these translations played a vital role in the transmission and circulation of knowledge about foreign peoples, lands, and customs in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. The collection makes an important contribution to travel writing studies by looking beyond metaphors of mobility and cultural transfer to focus specifically on what happens to travelogues in translation. Chapters range from discussing essential differences between the original and translated text to relations between authors and translators, from intra-European narratives of Grand Tour travel to scientific voyages round the world, and from established male travellers and translators to their historically less visible female counterparts. Drawing on European travel writing in English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, the book charts how travelogues were selected for translation; how they were reworked to acquire new aesthetic, political, or gendered identities; and how they sometimes acquired a radically different character and content to meet the needs and expectations of an emergent international readership. The contributors address aesthetic, political, and gendered aspects of travel writing in translation, drawing productively on other disciplines and research areas that encompass aesthetics, the history of science, literary geography, and the history of the book.

Antebellum slave narratives have taken pride of place in the American literary canon. Once ignored, disparaged, or simply forgotten, the autobiographical narratives of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and other formerly enslaved men and women are now widely read and studied. One key aspect of the genre, however, has been left unexamined: its materiality. What did original editions of slave narratives look like? How were these books circulated? Who read them? In Fugitive Texts, MichaEl Roy offers the first book-length study of the slave narrative as a material artifact. Drawing on a wide range of sources, he reconstructs the publication histories of a number of famous and lesser-known narratives, placing them against the changing backdrop of antebellum print culture. Slave narratives, he shows, were produced through a variety of print networks. Remarkably few were published under the full control of white-led antislavery societies; most were self-published and distributed by the authors, while some were issued by commercial publishers who hoped to capitalize on the success of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. The material lives of these texts, Roy argues, did not end within the pages. Antebellum slave narratives were "fugitive texts" apt to be embodied in various written, oral, and visual forms. Published to rave reviews in French, Fugitive Texts illuminates the heterogeneous nature of a genre often described in monolithic terms and ultimately paves the way for a redefinition of the literary form we have come to recognize as "the slave narrative."