Found in Translation. Translators and the Construction of Literary Authority in the 18th-Century Low Countries.

Through the lens of translators, this project seeks to shed new light on the construction of authority in the literary field of the 18th-century Low Countries. It will compare, for the first time, the Southern and Northern Netherlands in a large-scale systematic study of the previously overlooked but substantial share of translations. Combining quantitative data analysis with qualitative textual analysis, we will innovatively chart the performative agency of translators on three levels: 1) the macro-level of the literary field in which translators strive to acquire an established position; 2) the meso-level of translator types (hackwriters, debutants and women writers) and 3) the micro-level of specific agents and their careers. In doing so, the project tests the hypothesis that 18th-century literary translations were actively used in practices of self-representation and authority building. By shifting the focus to these long neglected and presumably 'non-original' works, this project not only proposes a new and historical perspective on literary career building but also drastically revises Netherlandish literary historiography.