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Part of
Interconnecting Translation Studies and Imagology
Edited by Luc van Doorslaer, Peter Flynn and Joep Leerssen
[Benjamins Translation Library 119] 2016
► pp. 53–67

National images in transit

Historical fiction and its translation in an age of competing nationalisms

Using a neglected case study, this essay questions the links between the rise and spread of historical fiction in nineteenth-century Europe, the use of national images, and the dissemination of an essentialist Romantic ideology of national character. It first examines various national stereotypes in Thomas Colley Grattan’s The Heiress of Bruges (1830), a novel set in the Low Countries around 1600. As they rely on different discourses on nationality and national character, Grattan’s national images turn out to be comparatively unstable. The essay then confirms this instability by contrasting the transformations of the novel’s hetero-images into auto-images in competing Belgian and Dutch translations, which appeared after the break-up of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in the 1830s.
Keywords: historical novel, Low Countries, Romanticism, national character, (Romantic) translation
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Grattan’s The Heiress of Bruges: A neglected historical novel
  • Grattan’s rhetoric of national character
  • The Belgian and Dutch translations of The Heiress of Bruges
  • References
Published online: 25 February 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.119.04ing
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