Translating the Opposing Forms of Free Indirect Speech Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre

What is it about?

A mix of direct speech’s tone and indirect speech’s tenses and pronouns, free indirect speech has inspired seminal theories of the novel and can also help us read individual novels as they appear in different languages. In the case of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, such a synoptic reading can even draw our attention to the co-existence of free indirect speech as we know it today and free indirect speech in quotation marks. Tracing the gradual disappearance of such quotation marks in German and Slovenian translations of Jane Eyre, their irreducibility to free indirect speech in today’s sense becomes apparent.

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