Analisi e traduzione di "The family law" di Benjamin Law

The aim of this dissertation is to propose a translation from English into Italian of The Family Law, an autobiographical novel written by Benjamin Law, an Australian author of Cantonese origins. The present dissertation is divided into four chapters. The first chapter presents the author of the book, by providing his biography; in addition, the chapter contains an overview of the Australia immigration problem, which is an important issue in the book due to the fact that the author’s parents had moved from Hong Kong to Caloundra, Australia. The second chapter presents the book The Family Law, by focusing on its main themes and by paying special attention to the description of the characters; furthermore, it analyses the plot of the chapters which I decided to translate, and provides a selection of Italian publishers which might be interested in publishing the book. The third chapter consists of my translation of the chapters I selected. The final chapter analyses the strategies I adopted while translating and examines some of the problematic issues that I encountered during the translation process, in particular at the level of morphosyntax, lexicon, cultural references, and style.

Charles P. Daly's Gendered Geography, 1860-1890

The American Geographical Society (AGS) serves as a case study for considering the nature of “gendered geography” in the nineteenth-century United States. This article links the ideals and programmatic interests of the society—which were fundamentally commercial in nature—with the personal subjectivity of its chief protagonist, Charles P. Daly, AGS president from 1864 until his death in 1899. Daly is presented as an “armchair explorer” who shifted the focus of the society away from statistical representations of the world toward the action packed narrative descriptions of the world supplied by embodied explorers in the field. The gender dynamics associated with the center versus the field provide a useful way to contrast both sides of Daly’s persona—as a scholar performing detached, careful study yet someone who also derived a great deal of personal authority by staging popular and dramatic spectacles in New York City, speechifying and presenting himself on stage at geographical society meetings with returning heroic explorers. Daly not only served as New York’ smost influential access point to the Arctic at the time, he also served as an important node in the reproduction of masculine culture in promotion of a particularly masculinist commercial geography. Key Words: American Geographical Society, Charles Patrick Daly, gender and geography, history of geography, masculinity.

Strategies of Representation, Relationship, and Resistance: British Women Travelers and Mormon Plural Wives, c. 1870-1890

During the 1870s and 1880s, several British women writers traveled by transcontinental railroad across the American West via Salt Lake City, Utah, the capital of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons. These women subsequently wrote books about their travels for a home audience with a taste for adventures in the American West, and particularly for accounts of Mormon plural marriage, which was sanctioned by the Church before 1890. "The plight of the Mormon woman," a prominent social reform and literary theme of the period, situated Mormon women at the center of popular representations of Utah during the second half of the nineteenth century. "The Mormon question" thus lends itself to an analysis of how a stereotyped subaltern group was represented by elite British travelers. These residents of western American territories, however, differed in important respects from the typical subaltern subjects discussed by Victorian travelers. These white, upwardly mobile, and articulate Mormon plural wives attempted to influence observers' representations of them through a variety of narrative strategies. Both British women travel writers and Mormon women wrote from the margins of power and credibility, and as interpreters of the Mormon scene were concerned to established their representational authority.

Civic Discipline: Geography in America, 1860-1890

Civic Discipline argues that the story of the origins of American geography is a distinctly "New York story." Wealthy businessmen began America's first geographical society - the American Geographical Society - in 1851, inspired by what geographical knowledge of the globe could offer an expanding American commercial Empire at home and abroad. AGS meetings were spectacularly popular among the public and press. At them, geography was cast as a science in the service of the public and civic good. Meanwhile though, AGS men's spatial and financial "missions" became closely linked. They helped improve derelict spaces in New York City and weighed in on controversial scientific questions of the day in the Arctic, yet the geographical knowledge they advanced - such as in the American West and in Central Africa - also created enormous personal wealth. Civic Discipline shows that it was not just that historical events shaped geography, but rather, that geography shaped historical events.