"Fashionable" Antiquity: literary translation and disguise, from France to England (1650-1700)

This essay offers a parallel study of English translations of the Classics published in seventeenth-century Britain and their subversive "imitations" also (paradoxically) flourishing at the time. While scholars have highlighted the "hypertextual" (Genette) dynamics of literary travesties and linked them to the decline of social and literary models inherited from the Humanist tradition, this study focuses more specifically on the intertextual and discursive, but also material and editorial connections that intimately associate "a la mode" rewritings of the Classics with neoclassical translation codes and practices - in particular the French "belles infideles" model that becomes dominant in Britain at that very same time.