JANE AUSTEN AND TRANSLATABILITY: PRIDE AND PREJUDICE ILLUSTRATED

Abstract

The text traces several definitions of “translatability” as a concept, drawing upon Walter Benjamin, Wolfgang Iser, Jacques Derrida, and Mary SnellHornby, in order to focus on the intersemiotic translation Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in the following illustrated editions: Bentley’s (1833), Allen’s (1894), Macmillan’s (1895), Winston Co’s (1949), and Marvel’s (2009). The novel proves to be translatable into the language of the visual, and popular enough in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. It justifies Virginia Woolf’s evaluation of Austen: “She stimulates us to supply what is not there.”