Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures

by Edited by Ananya Jahanara Kabir , Deanne Williams

• ISBN13: 9780521827317
• ISBN10: 0521827310
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-04-04
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This collection of original essays is dedicated to exploring the intersections between medieval and postcolonial studies. Ranging across a variety of academic disciplines, from art history to cartography, and from Anglo-Saxon to Hispanic studies, this volume highlights the connections between medieval and postcolonial studies through the exploration of a theme common to both areas of study: translation as a mechanism of and metaphor for cultures in contact, confrontation and competition. Drawing upon the widespread medieval trope of the translation of empire and culture, this collection engages the concept of translation from its most narrow, lexicographic sense, to the broader applications of its literal meaning, to carry across. It carries the multilingual, multicultural realities of medieval studies to postcolonial analyses of the coercive and subversive powers of cultural translation, offering a set of case studies of translation as the transfer of language, culture, and power.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	vii
Acknowledgments	ix
List of contributors	xi
Introduction: a return to wonder	1	(24)
Ananya Jahanara Kabir
Deanne Williams
Part I The afterlife of Rome
Anglo-Saxon England and the postcolonial void	25	(23)
Nicholas Howe
Mapping the ends of empire	48	(29)
Alfred Hiatt
``On fagne flor'': the postcolonial Beowulf, from Heorot to Heaney	77	(28)
Seth Lerer
Part II Orientalism before 1600
Alexander in the Orient: bodies and boundaries in the Roman de toute chevalerie	105	(22)
Suzanne Conklin Akbari
Gower's monster	127	(24)
Deanne Williams
Turks as Trojans; Trojans as Turks: visual imagery of the Trojan War and the politics of cultural identity in fifteenth-century Europe	151	(32)
James G. Harper
Part III Memory and nostalgia
Analogy in translation: imperial Rome, medieval England, and British India	183	(22)
Ananya Jahanara Kabir
``Au commencement etait l'ile'': the colonial formation of Joseph Bedier's Chanson de Roland	205	(22)
Michelle R. Warren
The protocolonial baroque of La Celestina	227	(26)
Roland Greene
Epilogue
Translations and transnationals: pre- and postcolonial	253	(16)
Ato Quayson
Bibliography	269	(19)
Index	288