Hilde Hoogenboom1; 1 Arizona State University, United States
Discussion
The international circulation of translated sentimental and hybrid sentimental realist novels, many by women, formed the backbone of the European literary empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet national literary histories ignore translations and marginalize women novelists. Novels in Russia were 90% foreign through the 1850s, yet already by the 1870s, Russian novels, including those by women, began to be translated and became part of international imagined communities. These hybrid sentimental realist novels did more than provide technologies for the transmission of communities. They prescribed the content of those communities by defining members and outsiders.
