French Burney: Some Notes on the Early Reception of Frances Burney's Novels in France.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35869/afial.v0i27.326Keywords:
Frances Burney, translation studies, France, eighteenth century, women’s literature, polysystem theoryAbstract
Frances Burney (1752-1840) was one of the main women writers in eighteenth-century Britain, where she cultivated the novel of manners and influenced Jane Austen herself. Burney’s works deal with topics that have attracted the attention of gender and cultural studies from the 1980s onwards. This paper focuses on the reception of Burney’s novels in France. After a proper contextualization of Burney’s life and France in her oeuvre, I resort to Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS), and the ideas of French scholar Gérard Genette on the paratext, as well as the contributions of eighteenth-century scholars in the field of Burney Studies. I analyze the prefaces introducing the first translations of Burney’s four novels into French and the reviews published in French newspapers at that time taking into account French poetics and the particular way in which Burney’s works were versioned in France.
