Sarah Austin's Transnational Advocacy For National Education In Nineteenth-Century Europe

Capancioni, C. (2025) Sarah Austin's Transnational Advocacy For National Education In Nineteenth-Century Europe. Lingue e Linguaggi. ISSN 2239-0367 (In Press)

Text Capancioni_revised_Article_Accepted_14 July 2025.pdf - Accepted Version Restricted to Repository staff only Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (431kB)

Abstract

This article examines the pioneering work of the British writer Sarah Austin (née Taylor, 1793-1867) who, in the nineteenth century, asserted her intellectual and political agency as a translator. A highly acclaimed interpreter of innovative philosophical and scholarly texts originally produced in French and German, Austin ascertained the high-level competence and agency crucial to producing a text for monolingual readers and the significant role that translation plays in stimulating social, political, and cultural change. Notably, translation skills were at the basis of her enduring contribution to shaping the discourse on national education in nineteenth-century Britain, which started with her translation into English of Victor Cousin’s Rapport sur l’État de l’instruction publique dans quelques pays de l’Allemagne et particulièrement en Prusse (1833). This article reclaims her engagement with intellectual and political debates on compulsory education, as a transnational, plurilingual advocate for primary education, and demonstrates how translation activism sustains archival research that recovers women’s agency and revises historiographies of translation studies. It focuses on Austin’s Report on The State of Public Instruction in Prussia (1834) together with On National Education (1839) and Two Letters on Girls’ Schools and on the Training of Working Women (1857) to show how, in the nineteenth century, Austin understands that, in the words of Patricia Hill Collins, “honing skills of translation constitutes both an important intellectual challenge and a political necessity” (in Castro and Ergun 2017, p. xii). In Women and Education, 1800-1980 (2004), Jane Martin and Joyce Goodman claim a place for Austin in the British history of education. This article asserts her innovative contribution with her distinctive act of cross-cultural literary production to widen our understanding of her transnational legacy as an advocate of primary education by examining specifically her translation theory and practice along with her writing on national education and women’s education.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is an author accepted manuscript of a paper accepted on 14th July 2025 by Università del Salento for publication inLingue e Linguaggi. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy.
Divisions:	School of Humanities
Depositing User:	Claudia Capancioni
Date Deposited:	02 Sep 2025 07:58
Last Modified:	02 Sep 2025 07:58
URI:	https://lbro.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/1254

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