Book Description

This thesis explores the reputation-building strategies which shaped eighteenth-century translation practices by examining authors of both translations and original works whose lives and writing span the long eighteenth century. Recent studies in translation have often focused on the way in which adaptation shapes the reception of a foreign work, questioning the assumptions and cultural influences which become visible in the process of transformation. My research adds a new dimension to the emerging scholarship on translation by examining how foreign texts empower their English translators, offering opportunities for authors to establish themselves within a literary community. Translation, adaptation, and revision allow writers to set up advantageous comparisons to other authors, times, and literary milieux and to create a product which benefits from the cachet of foreignness and the authority implied by a pre-existing audience, successful reception history, and the standing of the original author. I argue that John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Eliza Haywood, and Elizabeth Carter integrate this legitimizing process into their conscious attempts at self-fashioning as they work with existing texts to demonstrate creative and compositional skills, establish kinship to canonical authors, and both construct and insert themselves within a literary canon, exercising a unique form of control over their contemporary reputation. By examining the classical translations of Dryden and Pope alongside Haywood's popular French translations and Carter's scholarly and philosophical translations from Greek, Italian, and French, I show how each of these authors use conventions of classical translation, following similar strategies to build reputations. Both Pope and Dryden ask readers to compare them to a classical source, but Dryden promotes his writing by praising the authors he translates while Pope's relationship to his originals is often adversarial. Haywood refuses to follow the topos of modesty, demanding equality with her authors, while Carter caters to current fashions by displaying her faults while praising her original. Although they wrote for different audiences and in different genres, I argue that these writers and their contemporaries saw translation as a central part of their public identity and I call for increased scholarly attention to this dimension of self-fashioning in eighteenth-century literature.