The aim of this thesis is twofold: to deepen existing understanding of Turgenev's impact upon late nineteenth- century English literature by a concentrated study of his meaning for George Gissing and Henry James, and to study selected examples of English language translations of Turgenev's work in both their linguistic and their cultural aspects. The first of these two lines of inquiry is undertaken in the belief that existing studies of Turgenev's influence upon English writers have, on the whole, left untouched the question of the respective cultural contexts, within which Turgenev and his devotees wrote. It is this question, and in particular the awareness of historical determinism and its relation to culture on the part of Turgenev and his English admirers, that I have tried to explore. The second of my aims has been to perform the task, hitherto neglected, of assessing the stylistic qualities and linguistic accuracy of the most significant translations of Turgenev's work into English undertaken during the nineteenth century. Additionally, I have tried to establish the importance for those translations of the English cultural context in which they were undertaken. In doing so, I hope to have shown how the nature and reception of translations from so unfamiliar a tongue as Russian in the second half of the nineteenth century may be taken as indices of shifts in English cultural and historical perspectives during that period. To these ends, I have devoted the first and fourth chapters of this thesis to a study of English traBlations from Turgenev in the eighteen-fifties and eighteen-nineties respectively, while the second and third chapters assess the significance of Turgenev for two contrasting writers of the period, Gissing and James.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:354725 |
| Date | January 1984 |
| Creators | Turton, Glyn |
| Publisher | University of Warwick |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/114393/ |
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