- Title
- Whose national allegory is it anyway? Or what happens when crime fiction is translated?
- Creator
- Rolls, Alistair
- Relation
- Forum for Modern Language Studies Vol. 52, Issue 4, p. 433-448
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqw054
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2016
- Description
- In this article, modern Crime Fiction is shown to have its origins in translation, and more specifically in translation from a tense national space known, or posing, as American into another tense national space, French this time, in which identity is being reconstructed in terms of alienation and a problematizing of self-knowledge. As French national allegory was refashioned in response to trauma - as a result of Haussmannization in the mid-nineteenth century and of the Second World War a century later - the United States was always present as both ghostly Other and source of Crime Fiction. When Baudelaire translated Poe, he rethought the Paris that Poe had already placed at the centre of his crime-writing world; when Duhamel translated Cheyney and Chase in the wake of the Liberation of Paris, America was again reimagined as a new allegory for the post-war French condition. This paper traces the role of Crime Fiction, and its translation, in the formation of new national allegories; but it also simultaneously traces the rewriting of (French) national allegory in the development of (French) Crime Fiction. It concludes by pursuing this double phenomenon in the contemporary Crime Fiction scene with a review of the national allegory's interrogation in the context of retranslation.
- Subject
- Charles Baudelaire; crime fiction; Marcel Duhamel; Douglas Kennedy; national allegory; Edgar Allan Poe; retranslation; Se´rie Noire; translation; world literature
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1327141
- Identifier
- uon:25585
- Identifier
- ISSN:1471-6860
- Language
- eng
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