Oriental Networks: Culture, Commerce, and Communication in the
Long Eighteenth Century

Nature seems to have taken a particular Care to disseminate her Blessings among the different Regions of the World, with an Eye to this mutual Intercourse and Traffick among Mankind, that the Natives of the several Parts of the Globe might have a kind of Dependance upon one another, and be united together by their common Interest.
Joseph Addison

By uniting, in some measure, the most distant parts of the world, by enabling them to relieve one another’s wants, to increase one another’s enjoyments, and to encourage one another’s industry, their general tendency would seem beneficial. To the natives, however, both of the East and West Indies, all the commercial benefits which can have resulted from those events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasioned.
Adam Smith

    Oriental Networks explores forms of interconnectedness between Western and Eastern hemispheres during the long eighteenth century, a period associated with improved transportation technology, expanding intercultural contacts, and the emergence of a global economy. In eight case studies and a substantial introduction tracking the many connotations of networks, the volume examines relationships between individuals and institutions in East and West. These players engaged in forms of exchange which already shared many similarities with networks today and which could be regarded as their precursors. Addressing the exchange of cultural commodities (plants, animals, and artifacts), cultural practices and ideas, the role of ambassadors and interlopers, and representations of networks and networkers in literature and the visual arts, contributors discuss the effects of networking on people previously separated by vast geographical and cultural distance. Rather than idealizing networks as inherently superior to other forms of organization, Oriental Networks also considers Enlightenment expressions of resistance to networking that anticipate modern skepticism toward the concept of the global network and its politics. The volume contributes to a deeper understanding of the history of globalization and of the challenges global networks continue to present in the twenty-first century.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Aperçus: Histories Texts Cultures Series Editor: Kat Lecky

340 pages, 18 black-and-white images, 18 color images
Paperback (December 18, 2020) 9781684482719
Cloth (December 18, 2020) 9781684482726
PDF (December 18, 2020) 9781684482757
EPUB (December 18, 2020) 9781684482733

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgment
Introduction: Oriental Networks in the Long Eighteenth Century
Bärbel Czennia
Chapter 1: Knowing and Growing Tea: China, Britain, and the Formation of a Modern Global Commodity
Richard Coulton
Chapter 2: China-Pugs: The Global Circulation of Chinoiseries, Porcelain, and Lapdogs, 1660–1800
Stephanie Howard-Smith
Chapter 3: Green Rubies from the Ganges: Eighteenth-Century Gardening as Intercultural Networking
Bärbel Czennia
Chapter 4: The Blood of Noble Martyrs: Penelope Aubin’s Global Economy of Virtue as Critique of Imperial Networks
Samara Anne Cahill
Chapter 5: Robert Morrison and the Dialogic Representation of Imperial China
Jennifer L. Hargrave
Chapter 6: At Home with Empire? Charles Lamb, the East India Company, and “The South Sea House”
James Watt
Chapter 7: Commerce and Cosmology on Lord George Macartney’s Embassy to China, 1792–94
Greg Clingham
Chapter 8: Extreme Networking: Maria Graham’s Mountaintop, Underground, Intercontinental, and Otherwise Multidimensional Connections
Kevin L. Cope
Bibliography
Index
About the Contributors

Celebrity: The Idiom of a Modern Era

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

    Our present age appears almost obsessed with the cult of celebrity: with celebrating people who attain great fame and with the cultural events and paraphernalia surrounding them. Frequently associated with the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, celebrity is by no means a recent invention. The seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century also expended enormous energy in scrutinizing and analyzing the “celebrated” persons or events of their times. Indeed, the publicity apparatus that we associate with celebrity today is a natural outgrowth of the first experiments with mass media in the “early modern” and “modern” eras. This volume explores the genesis and the many different facets of “celebrity” during the long eighteenth century, both in English-speaking cultures and in the broader western sphere of cultural influence. Situated at the intersection of the history of ideas, literary history, theater history, art history, music history, media studies, animal studies, psychology, anthropology, and the emerging sciences, the topic of this collection is as interdisciplinary as the expertise of its international cast of contributors.

Publisher: AMS Press, Inc., New York (January 31, 2013)
Hardcover: 328 pages, 19 black-and-white images
ISBN-10: 0404648703
ISBN-13: 978-0404648701

    Among the animal celebrities of the eighteenth century are several cats, including the feline friends of Samuel Johnson and Matthew Flinders. Honored with sculptures throughout the world and commemorated together with as well as separate from their famous human companions, both cats are discussed in my essay “Pawprints on the Sands of Time” for this collection.

Statue of Trim, Matthew Flinders’s cat, on a window ledge of the Mitchell wing,
State Library of New South Wales, Sydney (Wikimedia Commons)

       Dr.  Johnson’s cat “Hodge,” Gough Square, London (private photo)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables and Illustrations
Introduction: Toward an Interdisciplinary History of Celebrity
Bärbel Czennia
I   Notorious, Curious, Eccentric: Celebrity and Eighteenth-Century Avant-Garde
Local Rogue, “Miraculous Conformist,” and Celebrity Charlatan: Valentine Greatrakes and the Emergence of Ordinary Modern Stardom
Kevin L. Cope
The Famous Vincenzo Lunardi: Rise and Fall of an Eighteenth-Century Aviator
Jessika Wichner
Horace Walpole: Six Dimensions of an Eighteenth-Century Celebrity
Hans-Ulrich Mohr
II   All the World’s a Stage: Female Celebrities Outside and Beyond the Eighteenth-Century Theater
“United Voices Formed the Very Perfection of Harmony”: Music and the Invention of Harriett Adams
Berta Joncus and Vanessa L. Rogers
“Angelicamad”—Then and Now
Waltraud Maierhofer
Olympe de Gouges: Eighteenth-Century Oprah or Madonna?
Megan Conway
III Stars, Comets, Comas, and Tails: Male Celebrities in the Eighteenth-Century Literary Market and Their Academic Afterimages
Sterne at Home (and) Abroad: An Assessment of a Perennial English Celebrity
Serge Soupel
Polydeuces in Weimar: Goethe’s Self-Fashioning
Katherine Arens
IV Exploring and Being Explored: Eighteenth-Century Celebrity and the Cultural Other
“The Celebrated Captain Cook”—Or Was He? Contemporary Press Coverage of the Third Pacific Voyage (1776–1780)
Sűnne Juterczenka
“To make him Known agreably, without his becoming a Shew”: Joseph Banks, Omai, and the Cultivation and Management of Celebrity
Michelle Hetherington
Pawprints on the Sands of Time: Animal Celebrities in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Bärbel Czennia
Afterword: The Limits of Categorization and Benefits of Cross-Comparison
Bärbel Czennia
Notes on Contributors
Index

Dialogue in the Novel as Translation Problem
A Study of Charles Dickens’s Works and Their German Translations

…when I want at home, I must seek abroad.
John Dryden

    The comparative study of novels and their translations involves practical challenges rarely encountered in the comparative analysis of shorter literary works. While translations of poems, short stories, and theater plays can be compared to their source texts word for word, the sheer volume of a novel requires a more selective approach. This holds especially true for nineteenth-century novels associated with literary realism and aptly described by Henry James as “large, loose, baggy monsters.” One of the most memorable features of Charles Dickens’s novels is the dialogue of his characters. Celebrated as true to life, Dickens’s literary representations of dialects, sociolects, idiolects, and many other features of human speech greatly contributed to the writer’s popularity and earned some of his fictional characters a place in the collective memory independent of the novels from which they sprang.
    For Charles Dickens, dialogue (or character speech) is a multi-functional narrative device that helps him achieve many artistic goals in addition to character development and implicit characterization: alternating between direct speech, indirect speech, and free indirect discourse (the deliberate fusion of an ostensible narrator’s voice and a character’s voice for special effects), his imitations of actual speech also facilitate the creation of a distinctive atmosphere or tone for central scenes, advance the plot, contribute to the internal communication among characters or the external communication between author and readers, and link different units of narration through thematic leitmotifs.
    For translation critics or historians who study Dickens’s novels side by side with their German translations, a comparative reading of dialogue excerpts facilitates the identification of typical translator behaviors and the prediction of translatory trends. It helps reconstruct a translator’s understanding of a novel within its “source” culture, a translator’s stylistic preferences (informed by time-specific linguistic or literary norms) on the “source” side, and even a translator’s self-perception as a literary re-creator and mediator between two cultures adhering to different traditions and conventions. The revelatory potential of character discourse for historical-descriptive translation studies is demonstrated by comparative readings of excerpts from Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and their German translations (published roughly between 1840 and 1980). Looking at 150 years of German Dickens reception through the lens of translators’ efforts to find ever new substitutes for the nuanced dialogue of Dickens’s characters also deepens our appreciation for the artistic complexity of his novels in English.

    Die literaturwissenschaftlich fundierte Untersuchung von Romanübersetzungen stellt ein besonderes arbeitstechnisches Problem dar, das nur mit Hilfe einer selektiven Vorgehensweise gelöst werden kann. Als besonders aussagekräftiges Beobachtungsfeld für vergleichende Analysen bietet sich die Figurenrede an: ein multifunktionales stilistisches Phänomen, das entscheidend an der Gesamtkonzeption der literarischen Langform beteiligt ist und wichtige Trendmeldungen zur historisch-deskriptiven Einordnung übersetzter Romane ermöglicht. Dies wird am Beispiel der deutschen Übersetzungsgeschichte von Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield und Great Expectations exemplarisch vorgeführt. Sprachlich-stilistische Eigenschaften der Ausgangstexte, individuelle Vorstellungen der Übersetzer von literarischer Gestaltung sowie zeitgebundene Traditionen, Konventionen und Normvorstellungen von Ausgangs- und Zielsprache, -literatur und -kultur verdichten sich zu immer neuen Lesarten auf der Zielseite. Sie regen rückwirkend auch zu einem vertieften Verständnis der ursprachlichen Fassungen an.

Publisher: Peter Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften (September 1, 1992)
Language: German
Perfect Paperback: 338 pages
ISBN-10: 3631452047
ISBN-13: 978-3631452042