Prismatic Jane Eyre is a radically collaborative enterprise. When faced with the many manifestations of the novel across cultures and languages we obviously need to work with many languages. What’s more, we need a range of critical approaches. The point of a project like this is to open up new modes of understanding, new modes of responding, for every reader. The prismatic phenomenon of the many translations of Jane Eyre requires a prismatic mode of criticism.

And so, in our scattered and diverse research group, we discussed and decided a lot of things together. Which words to look at, which passages were interesting, what might be meant by close-reading, what we understood by translation. That said, some of us have particular roles: Matthew Reynolds conceived the prismatic approach and leads the Prismatic Translation project: he wrote most of the text on this site. Sowon S. Park is Co-Investigator. Eleni Philippou is Postdoctoral Research Assistant. Giovanni Pietro Vitali is the Digital Humanities expert who created the maps and built this site.

You can meet many of the research group here (zoom in and click on the dots):

So this site represents the work of many people. Where possible, authorship will be tracked; in general, the work on the many languages was done as follows (you can find details of each researcher by going to their institution on the map):

Arabic: Yousif M. Qasmiyeh (Oxford University)

Chinese: Yunte Huang (University of California, Santa Barbara), Hongtao Wang (Beijing Foreign Studies University)

Croatian: Sasha Rudan (Uppsala University)

Danish: Ida Klitgård (Roskilde University)

Estonian and Finnish: Madli Kütt (University of Tartu)

French: Céline Sabiron with Léa Koves and Vincent Thiery (University of Lorraine, Nancy)

German: Mary Frank (Freelance, Bristol); Tom Cheesman (Swansea University)

Greek: Eleni Philippou (Oxford University)

Gujarati: Abhishek Jain (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan)

Hebrew: Adriana X. Jacobs (Oxford University)

Hindi: Abhishek Jain and Ulrich Timme Kragh (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan)

Italian: Alessandro Grilli (University of Pisa) and Matthew Reynolds (Oxford University) with a group of postgraduates and postdocs in Pisa: Caterina Cappelli, Anna Ferrari, Martina Pastorini, Valeria Ferrà, Benedetta Dini, Chiara Andreoni, Maria Scarmato, Chiara Polimeni, Federica Marsili, Fabio Bassani, Marilena Martucci. Paola Gaudio (Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro) has also recently joined the project.

Japanese: Yorimitsu Hashimoto (Osaka University)

Korean: Sowon Park (University of California, Santa Barbara); Eunjin Choi

Mongolian: Magda Szpindler (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan)

Persian: Kayvan Tahmasebian (Freelance, Isfahan, Iran) and Rebecca Gould  (University of Birmingham)

Polish: Kasia Szymanska (Oxford University)

Portuguese: Claudia Pazos Alonso (Oxford University) and Ana Teresa Marques dos Santos (Catholic University of Lisbon, Portugal)

Russian: Eugenia Kelbert (National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, and University of East Anglia); Karolina Gurevich

Serbian: Sasha Rudan (Uppsala University)

Slovenian: Jernej Habjan (Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana)

Swahili: Annmarie Drury (Queens College, City University of New York)

Spanish: Andrés Claro (University of Chile, Santiago), Patricia González Bermúdez (Trinity College Dublin)

Tibetan: Ulrich Timme Kragh (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan)

Turkish: Emrah Serdan (University of Istanbul)

Digital Humanities: Giovanni Pietro Vitali (Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines), Sasha Rudan (Uppsala University), Yuri Bizzoni (University of Gothenburg), Simone Landucci.

Rachel Dryden was postdoctoral research assistant in the first year of the project; Eleni Philippou (also our researcher for Greek) then took over the role. Chelsea Haith, Valeria Taddei, Erin Reynolds, Michael Reynolds and Joseph Hankinson provided further research assistance.

The project has also benefited from the intellectual generosity of people not directly connected to it: Patricia González Bermúdez and Marta Ortega Sáez, who shared their expertise in the Spanish translations, and the rare-book expert Jay Dillon, who alerted us to several, otherwise-unknown early editions.

Collaborators in the Jane Eyre Schools Project are listed here.

Text by Matthew Reynolds