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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Laura Kirkley
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
Recently, scholars have begun to examine how translations of Mary Wollstonecraft’s works influenced the development of ideas about women’s rights in nineteenth-century Europe and beyond. This article focuses on two translations of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): the anonymous French translation, Défense des droits des femmes (1792), and Rettung der Rechte des Weibes (1793-4), a collaborative work by the German educationists Christian Gotthilf Salzmann and Georg Friedrich Christian Weissenborn. I argue that Wollstonecraft’s feminist thought was reshaped by its passage into different national and cultural contexts. The translators develop strategies which partially reflect their different ideological contexts but also exceed easy categorisation as either sympathetic or hostile to Wollstonecraft’s explicitly Revolutionary feminism. The article furnishes a useful case study for the role translation plays in transmitting different versions of Wollstonecraft’s feminism to the diverse readerships of Western Europe, thereby granting her a complex translational afterlife.
Author(s): Kirkley L
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: European Romantic Review
Year: 2022
Volume: 33
Issue: 1
Pages: 1-24
Online publication date: 27/01/2022
Acceptance date: 13/07/2020
Date deposited: 14/07/2020
ISSN (print): 1050-9585
ISSN (electronic): 1740-4657
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2021.2019027
DOI: 10.1080/10509585.2021.2019027
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