AustLit

This title looks at the important role translation studies plays in exploring how words, sounds and images are translated and reinterpreted in new socio-cultural contexts. This volume presents fresh approaches to the role that translation - in its many forms - plays in enabling and mediating global cultural exchange. As modes of communication and textual production continue to evolve, the field of translation studies has an increasingly important role in exploring the ways in which words, sounds and images are translated and reinterpreted in new socio-cultural contexts. The book includes an innovative mix of literary, cultural and intersemiotic perspectives and represents a wide range of languages and cultures. The contributions are all linked by a shared focus on the place of translation in the contemporary world, and the ways in which translation, and the discipline of translation studies, can shed light on questions of inter- and hypertextuality, multimodality and new media in contemporary cultural production. Published in association with the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS), "Continuum Studies in Translation" aims to present a series of books focused around central issues in translation and interpreting. Using case studies drawn from a wide range of different countries and languages, each book presents a comprehensive examination of current areas of research within translation studies written by academics at the forefront of the field. The thought-provoking books in this series are aimed at advanced students and researchers of translation studies. [Trove]

'In the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks, the political situation in both the United States and abroad has often been described as a "state of exception": an emergency situation in which the normal rule of law is suspended. In such a situation, the need for good decisions is felt ever more strongly. This book investigates the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of various decisions represented in novels published around 9/11: Martel's Life of Pi, Eugenides' Middlesex, Coetzee's Disgrace, and Sebald's Austerlitz.

'De Boever's readings of the novels revolve around what he calls the 'aesthetic decision.' Which aesthetics do the characters and narrators in the novels adopt in a situation of crisis? How do these aesthetic decisions relate to the ethical and political decisions represented in the novels? What can they reveal about real-life ethical and political decisions? This book uncovers the politics of allegory, autobiography, focalization, and montage in today's planetary state of exception.' (Publication summary)

'Stanley Melbourne Bruce was at the centre of Imperial politics for more than two decades from the early 1920s until the end of the Second World War. This new biography presents Bruce as a consistent internationalist.

'Educated in Melbourne and Cambridge, Bruce, as a businessman, was alive to the importance of international commerce, and particularly Anglo-Australian trade. This lay at the core of his internationalism, which took the form in the 1920s of encouraging the political and economic integration of the British Empire.

'Bruce's punitive treatment of militant Australian trade unionists and his upholding of constitutionalism and law and order in the 1920s was part of an effort to defend one form of internationalism, commitment to the British Empire, against the competing international ideology of communism.

'While continuing to support a unified British Empire acting as a progressive force in world affairs, Bruce championed stronger international collaboration through the League of Nations and the United Nations and through cooperation between the Empire and the United States.' (From the publisher's website.)

'Nobel Laureate and the first author to win the Booker Prize twice, J.M. Coetzee is perhaps the world's leading living novelist writing in English. Including an international roster of world leading critics and novelists, and drawing on new research, this innovative book analyses the whole range of Coetzee's work, from his most recent novels through his memoirs and critical writing. It offers a range of perspectives on his relationship with the historical, political, cultural and social context of South Africa. It also contextualises Coetzee's work in relation to his literary influences, colonial and post-colonial history, the Holocaust and colonial genocides, the ‘politics' and meaning of the Nobel prize in South Africa and Coetzee's very public move from South Africa to Australia. Including a major unpublished essay by leading South African novelist André Brink, this book offers the most up-to-date study of Coetzee's work currently available.' (Publisher's summary)

'An ambitious and wide-ranging book by a well-known author that ranges from discussions of literary texts to an examination of Genesis, Mediterranean cookery, The Thousand and One Nights, Zionism and Anti-Zionism, Jewish mysticism and English Romanticism.1492 takes as a premise the 'lost world' of a shared Indian, Arab and Jewish culture which was destroyed in the early modern period by the expansion of Europe. For Docker, as for Salman Rushdie in The Moor's Last Sigh, the crucial event of 1492 was not the discovery of the Americas but the almost simultaneous final defeat of Moorish Spain in the fall of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews of Spain. Besides destroying the great Islamic-Judaic culture in Spain, it marked the beginning of nationalisms based on race, religion and language. Like the Crusades, it created a notion of Europe in opposition to a previous Mediterranean civilization and one of its direct results was the Spanish inquisition. 1492 was also the beginning of several diasporas and, in the course of examining several 19th-and 20th-century works that deal with the 'Wandering Jew' (Ivanhoe, Ulysses), the author goes on to look at a number of literary texts as a vehicle for speculating about various consequences and complications for cultural and intellectual history which followed from this 'lost ideal.'  (Publication summary)