Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review“In her paradigm-shifting
Fixers, Stahuljak boldly rewrites the terms of literary history as we understand it, decentering its national authors and genres to refocus our gaze on a late medieval literature that comes into being by and through its ‘fixers’—worldly translators and emissaries, diplomats, and merchants—whose activities give shape to an early, precolonial world literature. A study that will do no less than force a rethinking of existing accounts of medieval literary production,
Fixers is at the same time essential reading for scholars of world literature, translation, and decolonization.” -- Shirin Khanmohamadi, San Francisco State University
“In
Fixers, Stahuljak provides readers with a provocative and wide-ranging tour of medieval literary encounters and their mediation through multilingual and multicultural knowledge production. By centering the agency and experiences of fixers, she not only opens up new interpretive possibilities for seemingly familiar texts but develops a powerful analytic lens through which to study the multifaceted meanings and contingencies of translation in a medieval world released from the demands of modern agendas." -- Carol Symes, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Table of ContentsList of Figures
On Translations and Terminology
Introduction Fixers: Toward an Alternative History of Translation and Literature
Part I. Historical Realities: Strategy, Loyalty, and Gift
One The Politics of Translation: Foreign Language Acquisition, Conversion, and Colonization (Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Crusade Treatises)
Two The Economy of Translation: Missionaries to the Mongol Empire, Pilgrims to the Holy Land, and the Gift of Languages (Thirteenth to Fifteenth Centuries)
Part II. Disciplinary Realities: Authorship, Genre, and Literary History
Three The Ethics of Translation: Loyalty, Commensuration, and Literary Forms in the Fourteenth Century (Machaut, Froissart, Mézières)
Four Fixer Literature: (Pseudo)Translation and Manuscript Illumination (the Fifteenth-Century Court of Burgundy)
Five The Hermeneutics of Translation: Authorship and Genre (the Fifteenth-Century Court of Burgundy)
Conclusion Fixers: Early World Literature in the Age of the Global
Acknowledgments
Appendixes
Notes
Bibliography
Index
