Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry illuminates the dynamic mutual influences of poetic and translation cultures in Victorian Britain, drawing on new materials, archival and periodical, to reveal the range of thinking about translation in the era. The results are a new account of Victorian translation and fresh readings both of canonical poems (including those by Browning and Tennyson) and of non-canonical poems (including those by Michael Field). Revealing Victorian poets to be crucial agents of intercultural negotiation in an era of empire, Annmarie Drury shows why and how meter matters so much to them, and locates the origins of translation studies within Victorian conundrums. She explores what it means to 'sound Victorian' in twentieth-century poetic translation, using Swahili as a case study, and demonstrates how and why it makes sense to consider Victorian translation as world literature in action.

Winner, 2016 Sonya Rudikoff Award, Northeast Victorian Studies Association

'This book captures some of the many reasons why it's an exciting time to be a scholar of the British nineteenth century. … An important contribution to our emerging understanding of historical poetics. I hope other scholars consider her methods and continue the work of making Victorian poetry a more complex and world-conscious field of study.'

Jason Rudy Source: Review 19 (www.nbol-19.org)

'… Annmarie Drury’s welcome book, a patiently transformative study of the transformative power of translation.'

Matthew Reynolds Source: Review of English Studies

'… a welcome addition to our resources for understanding the multi-layered negotiations embedded within the Anglophone lyric.'

Rhian Williams Source: English Studies

'Drury’s book is also perforce engaged with political questions about imperial subjugation and the global distribution of power, as expressed in linguistic terms. One of the valuable aspects of Drury’s book is its attention not just to Victorian translation practice but also to the theories of translation, implicit and explicit, that were developed and enacted in this era, predominantly in the periodical press.'

William A. Cohen Source: Victorian Literature and Culture