Helen Chambers, postgraduate student in the Book History Research Group at the Open University, UK provides our latest blog from the Landmarks in the History of the Book series:

As part of the Open University/Institute of English Studies Book History seminar series ‘Landmarks in the History of the Book: the Future of the Discipline’ at Senate House, London, Dr Susan Pickford, Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Paris 13 gave, on 8 February 2012, a thought-provoking and wide-ranging paper exploring the relationship between international book history and translation studies.

By selecting as her starting point Pascale Casanova’s provocative book, La république mondiale des lettres (Seuil, 1999), trans. M.B.DeBevoise as The World Republic of Letters (Harvard, 2002), Dr Pickford not only inserted a ‘French accent’ into the seminar series, but provided the opportunity to consider a work which, while receiving high critical acclaim in translation, is rarely cited by book historians. Pickford pointed out that the mere existence in translation of this undeniably gallocentric work indicated interest in the further internationalization of book history. She gave us a succinct overview, focusing initially on Casanova’s world literary system, an interconnected hegemonic structure of central dominant and peripheral dominated cultural/language regions, where literary capital was, and still is, unevenly distributed; clearly echoing Fernand Braudel’s interconnected global economic systems. More.

See: Sharp