Multilingualism in Modernist Fiction

This book demonstrates that, rather than being an exceptional or unusual phenomenon, multilingualism is fundamental to modernist fiction. Focusing on the use of different languages by key modernist writers including D.H. Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Juliette Taylor-Batty examines the textual representation of interlingual encounters, the stylisation of translational discourse, the use of interlingual compositional processes, and the deliberate mixing of languages for stylistic purposes. She demonstrates that linguistic plurality is central to modernist forms of defamiliarisation, and examines the ways in which multilingual fiction of the period can be seen to reflect and challenge notions of national and linguistic 'rootedness'. This book demonstrates that much modernist fiction challenges contemporary anxieties regarding the 'artificiality' of 'cosmopolitan' forms of multilingualism, manifesting instead a fascination with processes of interlingual interference and mixing, and with subversive translational processes that fundamentally undermine traditional distinctions between original and translation, native and foreigner, mother tongue and foreign language.

Author: J. Taylor-Batty
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: 07/26/2013
Pages: 235
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 8.80h x 5.40w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780230224612

About the Author

Juliette Taylor-Batty is Associate Principal Lecturer in English at Leeds Trinity University, UK. She has published articles on Joyce, Beckett, Nabokov and Rushdie and is the co-author of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.