A corpus-based study on the translation of female middlebrow novels from the interwar period (1918-1939) into Spanish
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2025.e107573Palavras-chave:
female middlebrow novel, interwar period, corpus-based study, Spanish literary polysystem, sociology of translationResumo
The interwar period (1918-1939) in Britain coincided with the height of the so-called female middlebrow novel, which middle-class female authors wrote as a testament to the complexity and richness of their inner worlds and domesticity. These novels have already been thoroughly examined in their literary polysystem, but a lot remains to be done regarding their translation. Thus, the aim of this paper is to shed light on the dissemination of this type of novel in the Spanish literary polysystem. By conducting a corpus-based study, aspects such as how many of these novels remain untranslated, when did most of them reach the Spanish market or which factors governed these exchanges have been explored. Findings suggest that the modern revival of the female middlebrow novel in Britain—motivated, among other factors, by the efforts to rebalance the literary canon gender-wise—has found its echo in Spain through translation. This frames the female middlebrow novel within the phenomenon of the re-configuration of the canon, confirming it to be a proper case study for a wider investigation on the role of translation in this matter. However, the results presented in this paper also bring up new questions, mainly on the reasons behind these trends, which at the moment are merely speculative and which would need to be more thoroughly considered in the future.
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