Abstract
In Amies des Livres, I argue that women translators and cultural mediators were the dominant force in creating a transnational modernist literary culture in interwar Paris. This literary field has long been of interest to modernist studies due to the many expatriate Anglophone modernists living and writing in Paris, but scholarship has primarily focused on authorship to the exclusion of translation. With translation at the center of analysis instead of at the margins, previously invisible women translators become visible as co-creators of meaning and essential collaborators in a network of cultural exchange. I include women editors and publishers of literature in translation alongside translators in the category of “amies des livres” or [female] friends of books, a term I adopt from Adrienne Monnier. This dissertation includes chapters on Adrienne Monnier’s bookstore and publishing house as translation infrastructure, the translating and writing careers of Dorothy Bussy and Hope Mirrlees, and the French circulation and reception of Rosamond Lehmann and Virginia Woolf in translation. I employ methodology from the sociology of literature, book history, and reception studies to analyze translated texts in their material, social, and intellectual contexts. To that end, my corpus includes first edition novels and little magazines, published reviews, and largely unpublished diaries, letters, and business records. Many of the texts in my corpus are born-translated, meaning they were published and received near simultaneously in French and English, contributing to a contemporaneous shared modernist culture on both sides of the Channel. In contrast to the simultaneity of these born-translated texts, I theorize discordant temporalities of translation in texts that were translated belatedly because they were deemed untranslatable by translators, editors, or publishers or even appeared in translation before the original. Rather than thinking of translatability as an intrinsic quality of a text, my project reimagines translatability as contingent on the context of gender and power in publishing.
Committee Chair
Melanie Micir
Committee Members
Claire Davison; Anca Parvulescu; Caroline Kita; Vincent Sherry
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Author's Department
English and Comparative Literature
Document Type
Dissertation
Date of Award
8-2-2025
Language
English (en)
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7936/2nmz-vh34
Recommended Citation
Levin, Sophie, "Amies des Livres: Modernist Networks, Gender, and Translation in Literary Paris" (2025). Arts & Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 3599.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.7936/2nmz-vh34