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The road to the conference that inspired this issue of Lumen proved to be particularly long and circuitous.[1] This event was originally supposed to take place in Winnipeg: Treaty One territory, located on the traditional territory of Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples and the homeland of the Métis Nation, in 2020. However, the ongoing risks and uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic demanded that, as organizers, we postpone the conference until the fall of 2021. For a long time, we were hopeful that it would still be an in-person event, but we realized in the spring of 2021, as new variants emerged and we continued to see wave after wave of illness, that we needed to put the question to our scheduled presenters in a survey. Based on the responses we received and an overwhelming majority who preferred to deliver their papers virtually, we were convinced that we needed to adopt an online format.

Amidst the many challenges were gains for the conference because of the longer time we had for planning and preparation. For instance, one of the special events we envisioned for the conference in 2020 was a one-day workshop at the University of Winnipeg on the Indigenous eighteenth century, co-organized by Kathryn Ready and her colleague in English at the University of Winnipeg, Paul DePasquale. In the intervening period, these co-organizers were able to expand the Indigenous eighteenth-century one-day workshop to three full days that ran alongside the main program. They are now working to produce an edited collection from those presentations. This program provided an official opening to the conference with a roundtable, “The Past in the Present, Possibilities for the Future,” with greetings and blessings from Elder Calvin Pompana, moderation by Annette Trimbee, former President of the University of Winnipeg (current President and Vice-Chancellor, MacEwan University), and comments and response by Jennefer Nepinak, then Associate Vice-President of Indigenous Engagement at the University of Winnipeg. The main speakers were Elder Jeannette Armstrong, Elder Louis Bird, whose words were brought to us with assistance from Maureen Matthews, curator at the Manitoba Museum, and Elder Thomas R. Porter. In addition to panels, the Indigenous eighteenth-century program that followed included two two-part roundtables, one on teaching in the Indigenous eighteenth century, moderated by Megan Peiser and Willow White, and one on researching in the Indigenous eighteenth century, moderated by June Scudeler.

As conference organizers, we are grateful that we could adapt other special events online that we had originally planned in person, as well as adding some content designed specifically for online delivery. The author of Stolen City: Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg (2018), Owen Toews, provided a virtual version of what was to have been a physical walking tour of downtown Winnipeg. Bill Kerr, professor of theatre at the University of Manitoba, hosted a virtual workshop on gesture and bodily expression in Restoration comedy that was supposed to take place during an afternoon program at the Dalnavert Museum and Visitor’s Centre. Paul Rice, professor emeritus of musicology at Memorial University, provided us with an expertly curated pre-recorded eighteenth-century musical jukebox, and Sylvia Hunt, master lecturer of English at Laurentian University, gave us several entertaining pre-recorded eighteenth-century cooking demonstrations. Finally, Chantel Lavoie, with Leslie Ritchie, and Marc André Bernier organized two highly successful themed online salons. Because of the online format, we could record and post much of this special programming on CSECS (Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies)’s YouTube channel, along with recordings of all three of our keynote speakers.

To speak now to our conference theme, “Translation and Appropriation in the Long Eighteenth Century,” it must first be noted that translation has long been recognized as a central and crucial cultural phenomenon of the eighteenth century.[2] “Appropriation,” if not a term that has been in circulation in our critical vocabulary until lately, is particularly apt for characterizing the literary culture of this period, including the translation culture. There were arguably certain distinctive features to translation and appropriation activity during this period. The eighteenth century saw an explosion in print culture in response to a growing reading public, whose ranks were swelled by upwardly mobile members of the middle classes. The rise of commercial capitalism allowed much faster communication, transportation, and travel, contributing towards a more globalized world, further expanding markets for printed material. At the same time, the idea of intellectual property was still coalescing, with limited copyright only codified toward the end of the eighteenth century in Great Britain and France and far from the norm elsewhere.[3] A robust sense of an intellectual commons continued to thrive, manifested in the many translations and appropriations of material by others. It was the golden age of literary piracy. Literary characters of the past and present became the focus of transmedia events across Europe as the subjects of ballets, operas, and much more. Enduring favourites of the past included the heroes and heroines of William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. However, equally popular new literary characters emerged. Just a few from the English, French, and German contexts included François Fénelon’s Telemachus, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela Andrews, Antoine François Prévost’s Manon Lescaut, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Werther, Crusoe and Werther inspiring their own terms in the history of literary adaptation: the “Robinsonade” and “Wertheriaden.”

As well as European authors and other artists freely borrowing from the past and present within their own cultures and languages, this age saw particular interest in the translation and appropriation of materials drawn from other cultures and reinterpreted for European audiences. Increasingly globalized commerce and emergent fields of study focused on “exotic” cultures, such as Oriental studies and Sinology, that sought ostensibly to promote transcultural communication and fuel intellectual and artistic innovation. Knowledge of other peoples and places was a means of testing old and accepted ideas and generating new ones. This scholarly and creative work inevitably became implicated in imperial and colonial designs and unjust appropriations.

Within the field of eighteenth-century studies, translation and appropriation have already received significant scholarly attention, especially acts of translation and appropriations among various modern European nations and languages. As we know, the Enlightenment Republic of Letters contributed further towards a flourishing translation culture as part of the project of promoting the transnational circulation of ideas. Many eighteenth-century studies scholars have interested themselves in the role that translation played within Europe as a mode of cross-cultural communication and mediation, as well as in the sizable body of translation theory that accumulated from and beyond the late seventeenth century. By blurring the line between translation and other forms of literary creation, Mary Helen McMurran and others have highlighted the role of translation in literary innovation, notably in the history of the novel. The aims of translators and the history of translation theory have been other expanding areas of focus. Through the work of scholars such as McMurran, the eighteenth century has emerged as a key transitional moment between the translating system of the early modern period, when translation was associated with the linear transmission of power and knowledge over time, and the Romantic period, when “the matrix of translation” became “cultural not temporal.”[4]

In their articles in this volume, Florian Ponty and Monika Malinowska contribute to this vibrant conversation. Ponty’s “Les traductions des voyages imaginaires: exotisme et adaptation” (“Translations of Imaginary Voyages: Exoticism and Adaptation”) explores the ways that French translators adapted imagined travel narratives such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) for a French market, arguing that these translations, in balancing the translations of language, culture, and the exotic (as a culturally defined category) blur the lines between translation and original composition. Focusing on two French translations of Disputatio nova contra Mulieres, Qua probatur eas Homines non esse (1595), Malinowska examines two very different approaches to translating the Latin text into French to shed light on the translation debates around fidelity and free translation happening in France during the eighteenth century.

Tamara Abramovitch considers the tensions inherent in the fidelity versus free translation debates in the visual realm in her contribution, “A Certified Copy: Translating Images in the Eighteenth-Century French Print Market.” Focusing on the career of French engraver Nicolas de Launay, Abramovitch argues that engravers are best understood as translators who were very conscious of the strengths and weaknesses of their medium as they translated paintings into beautiful prints for the commercial marketplace. Rather than focusing on what is lost in the movement from painting to print, she highlights the differences that can be brought out in translation, changing the perspective through which we think about translation itself.

While the translation of Biblical and ancient classical texts continued to garner more prestige and monetary reward than other kinds of translation during the eighteenth century, the market for translating vernacular texts was quickly gaining ground. The increased study of vernacular languages among educated European men and women only hastened developments, and varieties of vernacular translation proliferated. Reginald McGinnis’s “Traduction et appropriation dans l’Encyclopédie, ou nouvelle apologie de l’abbé Mallet” (“Translation and Appropriation in the Encyclopédie, or the New Apology of Abbé Mallet”) enters the heart of shaping the French vernacular with its focus on the borrowings from Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia enacted by Denis Diderot and Jean le Ronde d’Alembert in their Encyclopédie project. Thinking about how vernacular publications and translations contribute to the formation of national identities, Vanessa Van Puyvelde’s “Beyond Boundaries: Negotiations of National Identity in Den Vlaemschen Indicateur (1779–87) and the Journal des Pays-Bas autrichiens (1786)” examines two literary periodicals published in the Southern Netherlands, one in French and one in Flemish, to argue for the importance of literary periodicals in the creation of a national consciousness prior to the 1789 Brabant Revolution. Elizabeth Kraft’s contribution to this volume, “Everyday Aesthetics and Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison,” presents an imaginative variation on this topic by turning to the quotidian and considering the ways that Defoe and Richardson translated everyday experiences into an aesthetics of the ordinary, revealing the beauty of the quotidian for British readers and explaining one source of their fiction’s enduring appeal.

Meanwhile, the field of postcolonial studies has demanded not only a broadening of eighteenth-century studies beyond the confines of Europe but also re-evaluation and a reckoning of the way that Europeans have translated and appropriated non-European cultures and how those peoples and cultures have figured within the European imaginary. In the course of the last two decades, the field of eighteenth-century studies has seen a turn towards what has been termed “the global eighteenth century.”[5] In recent years, scholars in eighteenth-century studies have been particularly interested in the Ottoman Empire and China, both of which remained important on the world stage throughout the period, sometimes over and against European ambitions.[6] The Western European fascination with the Ottoman Empire and China is evident in the vogue for turqueries and chinoiseries as well as the rise of Oriental studies and Sinology, which had a direct impact on literary culture, most prominently in the popularity of the Oriental Tale.[7]

A touchstone theorist for many in understanding translations and appropriations of non-European cultures in Western Europe is, of course, Edward Said, who has called for a general re-examination of Western interest in and representation of the East. As Claire Gallien and Olivera Jokic have noted, with his landmark study, Orientalism (1978), Said appropriated and transformed a term that once connoted “cultural appreciation and interest” into one that “name[d] a relationship of mistrust, abuse, and control.”[8] Looking back on history, Said has raised crucial questions about whether the historic popularity of translations and reworkings of Oriental texts and artifacts can be construed as evidence of cultural appreciation or whether these were, in fact, part of an effort to exert domination and control, or perhaps a little of both. Drawing on the concept of Orientalism, scholars of eighteenth-century studies such as Robert Markley, Ros Ballaster, and Eugenia Zuroski have asked us to rethink Western European representations of the so-called “East,” with Zuroski tracking a prehistory of Orientalism through a select analysis of eighteenth-century literary sources.[9] Another impact of Said’s insights can be seen in various scholarly efforts to reverse the colonial gaze.[10]

Arguably, Said has only become more relevant recently in anticipating current debates around cultural appropriation, which have encouraged us to weigh general claims of artistic and intellectual freedom and forms of culture available to all versus artistic and intellectual responsibility, the claims of distinction between cultural appreciation and appropriation, and some specific arguments made for and against allowing a majority culture to borrow from a minority culture. Those who view such borrowing more positively have argued that it promotes diversity and empathy, and mainstream acceptance of a minority group and culture to revitalize and/or maintain the vitality of a minority culture, creating opportunities for the members of a minority group artistically and intellectually. Those who are more skeptical in this context argue, for their part, that cultural appropriation constitutes no more than the exploitation of a minority culture as symbolic capital for the primary purpose of capitalist profit.

The appropriation of specifically Indian habits and dress on the eighteenth-century stage is the subject of Rose Hilton’s contribution to this issue, “The Nabob, National Identity, and Social Performance in Elizabeth Griffith’s A Wife in the Right (1772).” In her article, Hilton explores how Griffith’s play uses a representation of the nabob figure that is uncharacteristically sympathetic for the time to scrutinize changing British national identity in a colonial context and argues for the performative nature of that identity. Jeremy Chow approaches the issue of racial appropriation within a transmedial and pedagogical framework in “Race, Gender, and Memes: Reactive Blackness and Teaching the Eighteenth Century.” Through a detailed discussion of his Meme Museum assignment, Chow explores the ways that memes can provide new understandings of eighteenth-century texts for ourselves and our students while opening up new questions and problems surrounding what he terms “reactive blackness”: the use of reaction memes featuring Black celebrities by predominantly white students.

Another impetus for us was to advance scholarship related to media studies, including screen studies and adaptation studies, in connection to eighteenth-century studies.[11] Burgeoning contemporary fields in media studies have invited new perspectives on eighteenth-century texts whose popularity led to their adaptation into different media in their own day and on the eighteenth-century practice of what came to be termed in the twentieth century as “fan fiction.” As theorized by David A. Brewer, many eighteenth-century readers engaged in the “imaginative expansion” of literary characters, not only characters who were already famous, as, for example, in Shakespearean drama, but also many who were newly created.[12] Scholarship in media studies has inspired additional burgeoning interest in the translation, adaptation, and appropriation of eighteenth-century texts and the eighteenth century itself across media and over time. While screen adaptations of famous eighteenth-century texts, such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), have excited critical commentary, much of it was historically hampered by what scholars of screen studies have characterized as a misguided preoccupation with “fidelity,” that is, the extent to which a screen adaptation might be considered “faithful” to its original source text.

The abandonment of fidelity criticism has had a liberating effect in screen studies and the field of historical fiction, with direct implications for thinking about adaptations of eighteenth-century texts and realities into a twenty-first-century context, as, for example, in the most recent addition to screen adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, the 2022 summer release Fire Island.[13] One of the conference keynote talks, “Performance Anxieties: Stage Presence and the Presence of the Stage in the Transmedial Worlds of Twenty-First-Century Period Drama,” by Ros Ballaster, explored scenes of performance in current popular period dramas set in the eighteenth century, arguing that these representations are less interested in representing the theatre than in representing affective reception, translating a historicized affect for contemporary viewers. Chantel Lavoie, in “Freakish Masculinity in the Eighteenth Century: Andrew Miller’s Ingenious Pain and Hilary Mantel’s The Giant, O’Brien,” examines the ways that eighteenth-century masculinity and disability are represented in current historical fiction, arguing for the value of looking back to the eighteenth century to elucidate ideologies that still preoccupy our present moment.

In keeping with CSECS tradition, we wanted, above all, to choose a theme that would be malleable and suggestive, encouraging presenters to take it in a wide range of different directions. The range of presentations at CSECS-MWASECS 2021 well answered our hopes. We had examinations of many specific examples of translation work during the period, by better-known and lesser-known figures, across many different literary genres and artistic media. Due consideration was given to translation theory then and now, and to the fields of translation studies and literary studies going forward in a continuing age of globalization. The geographical scope of the conference was broad, including Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Turkey, China, and North America. The afterlife of the eighteenth century, too, was well represented.

That variety is evident in our current volume. In addition to the many articles already mentioned, the issue also features Allison Muri’s presentation of the literary interpretive possibilities offered by the visual analysis tools of the Grub Street Project. “Alexander Pope’s Dunciad and Ned Ward’s London Spy: Experiments in Text Visualization” illustrates the new possibilities for inquiry when Pope’s and Ward’s texts are translated into visual mappings of language use and geography while raising some important questions about the framing choices that need to be made as a part of the digital editing process. Karen A. Macfarlane’s “Defining and Negotiating the Limits of the Immunity of Diplomatic Servants in Eighteenth-Century England” demonstrates the role that prosecutions for debt and the laws governing the servants of foreign diplomats in England played in the later formation of international law and diplomatic immunity.

A final aspiration of the conference theme answered in both the presentations and contributions to the present volume is the encouragement we wanted to give to interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary scholarship. Perhaps most clearly responding to this call among our contributors is Eric Miller. Miller’s article, “True Touches of Nature: Laurence Sterne and the Sacred Heart,” ranges across eighteenth-century literary, medical, and religious culture (and, notably, across persisting Protestant and Catholic divides) in a fresh reading of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768) as a subtle act of contrition for the author’s earlier anti-Catholicism.

We hope that readers of Lumen No. 41 will concur with our own sense of the productive possibilities and future lines of inquiry our conference theme and special issue have opened up. As we have aimed to build on the work of previous conference organizers and Lumen editors, we offer up this volume with the wish that it will continue to enrich conversations in eighteenth-century studies going forward.