Borrowed Words Translation, Imitation, and the Making of the Nineteenth-Century Novel in Spain

9780838755204

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This book addresses the apparent paradox that is at the base of the processes of cultural production and consumption in mid-nineteenth-century Europe: the fact that nations at different narrative stages became contiguous literary markets. It focuses on translations and imitations of foreign literary models and on their role in setting up the bases of the bourgeois novel in Spain. Against the traditional rejection of translations and imitations as alien to Spanish processes of cultural formation, the book argues that these writing practices constitute both a discourse on national identity and an autochthonous writing. The book contends that the acknowledgment of translation and imitation in the literary life of a country implies the recognition of new and different frontiers that destablize the national confinement (as well as the nationalistic values) of literary histories. In translation and imitation, borders are experienced not as the demarcation of otherness, but rather as crossroads in one's own quest for identity.