This thesis examines three contemporary autobiographical narratives - Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), A.S. Byatt's Sugar and Other Stories (1987) and Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) - and their Italian and French translations. My comparative analyses of the texts are underpinned by the latest developments in Translation Studies that place emphasis on identity construction in translation and the role of translation in moulding various types of identity. They focus on how the writers' textual personae make sense of their sexual, artistic and postcolonial identities in relation to the mother and how the mother-daughter relationship survives translation into the Italian and French social, political and cultural contexts. My Introduction outlines my methodology and approach. Theo Hermans (1999) has provided me with a model capable of encompassing Descriptive Translation Studies and cultural analysis. Recent studies on the mother-daughter relationship have offered the framework of analysis of the female characters. The six chapters that follow show how each Target Text activates different cultural, literary, linguistic and rhetorical frames of reference which bring into relief the facets of the protagonist's quest for identity that might be hidden or ambiguous in the Source Text: religious icons and the cult of the Madonna; humour and irony; gender and class; mimesis and storytelling; spatial representations and geographical sense of self; narrative performance and performativity; negativity and women's strength. Whereas the French translation of Oranges highlights the interplay of gender and class, the Italian version brings into focus the religious and political constraints on the protagonist's quest. The Italian and French translations of 'Sugar' emphasize Byatt's fictional explorations of the maternal artistic model. The French version of Autobiography normalizes orality and performativity; the Italian one enhances complex aspects of negativity. This thesis highlights the fruitfulness of studying women's narratives and their translations and the polyphonic dialogue between the translations and the literary and theoretical productions of the French and Italian cultures.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:579175 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Maestri, Eliana |
| Contributors | Giorgio, Adalgisa ; Parish, Nina |
| Publisher | University of Bath |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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