III. Locating the Translations

This chapter discusses the interactive digital maps: the General Map, World Map, Time Map and Covers Maps. It draws attention to the importance of cities for the novel’s publication history, and considers what sort of geographical space a translation occupies. It introduces the concept of an ‘act of translation’; that is, either the publication of a new translation or the re-publication of an existing translation in a different place. Surveying the geographical distribution of Jane Eyre translations, it shows that they do not spread out from the ‘centre’ in orderly ‘waves’, in line with world-system theory, but rather respond to the demands of more particular ‘significant geographies’ with their own competing centres. It goes on to discuss the relation between the world imagined in the novel and the world(s) in which the translations are located. While each translation imagines the world of the novel slightly differently, it is also the case that the world of the novel affects how the translations situate themselves in relation to it.