European Literatures in Britain, 1815-1832: Romantic Translations

This book offers new perspectives on the pervasive and transformative impact of Continental European literary traditions on literature in Britain during the transitional decades between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Specifically, it focuses on the increasingly cosmopolitan literary world of the years following the anti-French conflict of 1793-1815. Studies of British Romanticism have traditionally tended to approach it as an intensely local and insular phenomenon. Yet, just as the seemingly isolated British Isles became more and more central in international geo-political and economic contexts between the 1780s and the 1830s, so too Britain’s literature was characterized by an increasingly close and relevant dialogue with foreign and especially European literatures, both past and present. Through a focus on interlinguistic and ‘cultural’ translation and appropriation, this book examines the unprecedented expansion in engagements with European literatures between the mid-1810s and the mid-1830s, which led contemporary writers and commentators to reflect on the nature of the nation’s literature and culture as well as to develop them in new, international and transnational, directions.