Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature [Minkštas viršelis]

"Fixers is an erudite, ambitious book that synthesizes concepts from medieval studies and modern translation theory, offering salutary reading for students and scholars of both. It offers an exciting lens for reading the work of fixer-travelers and translators across the medieval world from Chaucer, who worked by day as a customs official and diplomat, to Arabic-language travel writers such as Ibn Fadlan and Ibn Batutta." * Times Literary Supplement * Stahuljak, who used to work as an interpreter in war zones, uses the term [ fixer] by analogy with the local interpreters-guides-brokers who make it possible for modern journalists to function in alien terrain. She emphasizes that the work they do as interpreters . . .  is more creative than we might assume. Medieval writers, readers and travelers understood translation as a dynamic process. * London Review of Books * [ Stahuljak] asks us to rethink medieval translators and all the social and political roles they served beyond simply rendering meaning from one language into another.  * History Today, Book of the Year * "Medieval European pilgrims, merchants, and missionaries relied on fixers in foreign lands not only for linguistic services, but also for extensive assistance in facilitating communication, mediating situations, wayfinding, and even protection along the way. By exploring the role and meaning of fixers in medieval society, Stahuljaks goal is nothing less than a paradigm shift through which the study of early global literature can free itself from national and colonial modes of thinking, an ambitious goal that this book goes a long way toward achieving. . . In Fixers, Stahuljak not only elevates a rarely studied aspect of medieval studies to the level of more traditional avenues of inquiry, but also convinces the reader of how investigating this story can at once challenge the basic tenets underlying medieval studies and reveal the relevance of such an approach to understanding the modern phenomenon of globalization." * Speculum * "A provocative and productive perspective toward how to identify global aspects already in the European Middle Ages." * Mediaevistik * In her paradigm-shifting Fixers, Stahuljak boldly rewrites the terms of literary history as we understand it, decentering its national authors and genres to refocus our gaze on a late medieval literature that comes into being by and through its fixersworldly translators and emissaries, diplomats, and merchantswhose activities give shape to an early, precolonial world literature. A study that will do no less than force a rethinking of existing accounts of medieval literary production, Fixers is at the same time essential reading for scholars of world literature, translation, and decolonization. -- Shirin Khanmohamadi, San Francisco State University In Fixers, Stahuljak provides readers with a provocative and wide-ranging tour of medieval literary encounters and their mediation through multilingual and multicultural knowledge production. By centering the agency and experiences of fixers, she not only opens up new interpretive possibilities for seemingly familiar texts but develops a powerful analytic lens through which to study the multifaceted meanings and contingencies of translation in a medieval world released from the demands of modern agendas." -- Carol Symes, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign