Volume 44, Issue 2

Both inter-literary and translational transfer contributed to the making of a distinctive English-language literature in British America and the early United States. Writers residing in America either kept the Britain-based Atlantic reading culture homogeneous by catering to the British reading tastes of many immigrants or, by means of “deviating responses” to eminent British works, helped to bring about an “Americanizing” dissociation. – We need a conceptual frame of reference for this kind of historical study. Americans who studied at German universities, German immigrants, and American literati working from their own country gave nineteenth-century American literary culture a recognizably German dimension.

The Dutch morality play Elckerlijc, written at the end of the fifteenth century, and its translations and adaptations into English and Latin, may add some new insight into the role of systems and polysystems in the early modern period. It also modifies the concept of foreign literature, since Latin and vernacular literatures written within one country influenced each other intricately. Thus, the international Latin Republic of Letters was foreign in its use of another language, but it was common in the use of the same subjects, motifs and structures.

What were the conditions and mechanisms that determined the reception of German Jewish exile literature in the Netherlands during the 1930s? Why did neither the Dutch Jewish nor the German Jewish exile literature published in the Netherlands become part of Dutch literary history? The article seeks answers to these questions by means of examining reviews, essays, and letters relating to Dutch Jewish and German Jewish exile literature within polysystem theory and the use of critical discourse theory.

During the First World War and the interwar period, bilateral societies played an important role in the processes of literary and cultural transfer between the Netherlands and the surrounding countries. This article sets out to explore part of the reception of French literature and culture in the Netherlands by studying the cultural repertoire developed within the “Genootschap Nederland-Frankrijk” (The Netherlands-France Society) between 1916 and 1919. Analysis of the institutional settings and discursive practices concerning this international transfer brings to light how some prominent spokesmen in and around the Society constructed a strategic repertoire in order to (re)define Dutch cultural identity.

Institutions have, from a systemic point of view, a complementary function in cultural repertoire formation. This function is illustrated by the role publishers and translators played in the literary socialisation of readers between 1880 and 1940, a role they took over, partly or entirely, from educators and teachers of literature. In this period, language teaching in the Netherlands assigned a key position to Dutch literature and marginalised literature in other languages. However, the activities of publishers and translators added an international frame of reference to the mainly national repertoire imparted to the pupils. Several circumstances stimulated this cosmopolitan transformation, such as internationalism and the advancing professionalization of translation at the beginning of the twentieth century.

This article examines key developments and cross-national variations in the coverage of foreign literatures in U.S., Dutch, French, and German elite newspapers between 1955 and 2005. Such coverage is indicative of the interest in foreign literatures among literary mediators and readers and the degree and direction of “globalization from within.” Using content analysis, the degree, direction, and diversity of the international orientation of literary journalism are charted for each country. The results indicate that the degree of international orientation is inversely related to the centrality of a country's literary production. Results show a clear internationalization of literary coverage in the French newspapers, which coincides with the declining dominance of French literature in the late twentieth century literary world-system. German and Dutch papers' literary coverage already showed a high level of internationalization in 1955 and remained fairly constant, with foreign literature taking up around half of the total coverage devoted to literature. The NY Times, by contrast, devoted roughly one quarter of its coverage to foreign literature throughout the research period. Although the global diversity of coverage in all four countries has increased, international coverage is largely confined to a select group of “core” countries and to countries belonging to the same language area or region, and domestic literature remains important.

Scholars of German Reception Aesthetics have studied literary reception processes. However, their concept of the reader was rather abstract and text-based. Conversely, the sociology of reception has focused on social mechanisms and conditions outside the text. The theory of cultural transfer, as well as Bourdieu's propositions concerning the international circulation of ideas bring to the fore the decisive role of the fields of reception. The present case study of the Western Swiss author Jean-Luc Benoziglio shows various facets of international literary reception. It compares the reactions to the French work and its German translations in Switzerland, France and Germany. In spite of an early positive resonance, no work has been translated into German after 1993. Economic reasons, but also a stagnating interest in French avant-garde literature may explain this.

Vladimir Nabokov once inimitably reflected on a consequence of exile: “I don't seem to belong to any clear-cut continent. I'm the shuttle-cock above the Atlantic, and how bright and blue it is there, in my private sky, far from the pigeon-holes and the clay pigeons.” Looking into aspects of Nabokov's work related to exile and assimilation, I suggest that Nabokov's cosmopolitanism is mirrored in the current international reception of his work. The article makes use of Kwame Anthony Appiah's notion of “cosmopolitan contamination” and that of John Burt Foster Jr.'s “cultural multiplicity.”

The systems approach of book history should be applied to the study of translations, because it sheds light on the agents who influence their genesis and distribution – such as mediators, translators, publishers, censors and readers. In the 1820s, which saw a significant increase in book production and translation, the translation of Walter Scott's works was mainly carried out as ‘hackwork’ by ‘speculative’ publishers unhindered by international copyright protection. In Austria, translations of his work were censored in order to conform to religious and political standards. Despite such interventions, Scott quickly became a favourite of the German reading public, as reflected in unprecedented print runs. Flaubert shared a similar fate: integrated into a popular novel series, the first German translation of Madame Bovary abounds with traces of the translator's self-censorship.