| Annotation: | Language boundaries are not transparent; recent advances from translation to psycholinguistics make it clear that they cannot be crossed without sacrifice and a complex negotiation of gains. A growing body of research on literary multilingualism, including my prize-winning doctoral thesis, show that moving a text, or indeed an author, into a different language leads to shifts in semantic, emotional and stylistic emphases. However, unlike the transfer of meaning (the initial impetus for the hugely successful discipline of translation studies), the transfer of style in language contact settings has received little critical attention. To change this status quo is to take issue with comparing in comparative literature. Rather as translation was ‘noticed’ in the 1960s, it is time to notice the patterns, losses and gains whereby stylistic features are re-created between languages as a decisive step towards a comprehensive theory of language contact in literature. My goal is to tackle cross-lingual stylistic transfer as a methodological challenge shared by several fields but largely unacknowledged outside translation studies. This project consequently reframes literary translation as the best understood among several distinct kinds of language contact reliant on cross-lingual stylistics. Hence the twofold structure of this project: from exploring the relationship between the translated text and the original text to an alternative paradigm for the study of literary language contact explored through case studies in areas such as translation, self-translation, influence, multilingualism and international literary movements. |