“Mapping North–South Cross-Currents: Toward a Translational Approach to British Romantic Literature and Culture”

What would a translation-centered narrative of British literature and culture in the Romantic period be like? What would it highlight and reveal? To what extent would it transform critical and literary- historical approaches to the period? This essay examines forms of interlinguistic and cultural translation in the Romantic literary- cultural field to assess their presence and impact from a systemic perspective. Through such spatial categories as networks and webs, the assemblage, and the translation zone, this essay outlines a translation-centered narrative of British Romantic-era literature and culture by charting selected translational flows connecting northern and southern traditions—from Henry Mackenzie’s pioneering “Account of the German Theatre” (1788) through to the lively translational environment of the 1820s exemplified by Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine’s “Horae Germanicae,” Walter Scott’s novels, or Sarah Austin and Edgar Taylor’s Lays of the Minnesingers (1824). Moving translation from a secondary or ancillary function to a focal position, this essay reconsiders how interlinguistic and cultural translations inform literary and cultural production between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and effectively structure the Romantic field, as well as suggesting which kinds of tales can be told about it through a translation-centered approach.