Nation in Translation: National Reform and Cultural Translation in George Eliot’s Felix Holt

초록

Focusing on George Eliot’s political novel, Felix Holt: The Radical, set during the time of the First Reform Bill (1832) and written on the eve of the Second Reform Bill (1867) in England, this article examines the way the novel addresses the question of national reform as an act of cross-cultural translation. The first half of this essay analyzes the way Eliot situates national debates about political reform within a European literary canon, reimagining the novel as a vehicle for reflective travel and the English reader as a tourist in her own nation, in order to unsettle ‘Little England’ national narratives and critique British imperial jingoism. The second half of this paper examines the way the novel’s supplementary “Address to Working Men” imports the central tenets of Giuseppe Mazzini’s political writings into her English novel and translates the Italian patriot’s appeal to Italian working men on the eve of Italian national unification into her vision of English national reform as a form of transnational acculturation. Rather than provincializing Eliot’s novel by grouping it with earlier social-problem novels such as Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, or Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, as many Victorian scholars have, it is essential to recognize the transnational circulation of ideas in the novel and the centrality of translation at the heart of Eliot’s vision of national reform.

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