BiblioVault - Books about Cultural Transfer

Christian Felix Weiße the Translator

Cultural Transfer and Literary Entrepreneurship in the Enlightenment

Tom Zille

University of London Press, 2021

Christian Felix Weiße (1726–1804) is best known as a dramatist and an influential children’s writer of the Enlightenment period. This volume is the first book to explore his singularly extensive output as a literary translator. Tom Zille investigates the conditions which allowed Weiße to become the most prolific German translator of English literature in the eighteenth century, a popular translator of French drama, and an influential editor and “entrepreneur” of the translations of others. Drawing on previously unpublished correspondence, the study examines Weiße’s wide-ranging professional networks as a cultural mediator of European significance. Special attention is paid to his role in the German reception of the Ossian cycle of poems, his introduction of English children’s literature to Germany, his translations of popular prose, and the intersections between his original writing and translations.

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Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer

Paris, 1830-1914

Edited by Annegret Fauser and Mark Everist

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Opera and musical theater dominated French culture in the 1800s, and the influential stage music that emerged from this period helped make Paris, as Walter Benjamin put it, the “capital of the nineteenth century.” The fullest account available of this artistic ferment and its international impact, Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer explores the diverse institutions that shaped Parisian music and extended its influence across Europe, the Americas, and Australia.

The contributors to this volume, who work in fields ranging from literature to theater to musicology, focus on the city’s musical theater scene as a whole rather than on individual theaters or repertories. Their broad range enables their collective examination of the ways in which all aspects of performance and reception were affected by the transfer of works, performers, and management models from one environment to another. By focusing on this interplay between institutions and individuals, the authors illuminate the tension between institutional conventions and artistic creation during the heady period when Parisian stage music reached its zenith.

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Renaissance Masculinities, Diplomacy, and Cultural Transfer

Federico and Ferrante Gonzaga in Italy and Beyond

Jessica O'Leary

Amsterdam University Press, 2024

Federico and Ferrante Gonzaga came of age during a time of intense change in sixteenth-century Italy: The Italian Wars (1494–1559). The first and third-born sons of Isabella d’Este and Francesco Gonzaga spent their formative years at the courts of Francis I of France and Charles V of Spain, where, as effectively diplomatic hostages, they learned valuable lessons about the transnational social codes and rituals central to sixteenth-century political life. As adults, they applied these lessons in their political and martial collaborations with Charles V: supporting his dominions in Italy, facilitating his attempted colonisation of northern Africa, and praising his attacks on Muslim pirates in the Italian Mediterranean. This book uses epistolary, literary, and material sources to argue that the boyhood and adult experiences of Federico and Ferrante Gonzaga are illustrative of wider strategies adopted by elite Italians to respond to conflict and crisis in a global age.

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