"Shakespeare and the English Canon: a research and translation project" is both a continuity, an extension and an inflection of the project to produce a new complete translation of Shakespeare's drama, developed at IEI over the past few years. As a continuity, it aims to bring that project to completion; but its renewed goals also involve taking some of the ruling concerns of the earlier project - at the multiple crossroads of literary criticism, translation (studies), reception, and literary history - onto a broader and more ambitious stage. This extension is theoretically buttressed by prevalent critical mores, favourable as they are to relational forms of reading. More specifically, it seeks support for its rationale in the influence that polysystem theory has gained in translation studies in recent decades. This entails an awareness of the enabling power that various textual categories derive from the interactions that establish their variable positions vis-à-vis the centre of the canon and its no less defining peripheries.

But the extension is also eminently literal and textual: it will mean applying to other authors and texts the research and translation designs that the group has brought to bear on the Bard's plays. Team members have previously devoted to other areas of the English canon an attention that combines criticism and translation: examples include Eliot, Pound and Larkin. Further, students of the Literary Translation graduate programme - created on the basis of the work carried out by this group - have been prompted to produce collective versions of texts ranging from Romanticism to postmodernity, and from the short lyric to the critical essay.

These general aims will be pursued by the research group in the following ways:

1. publishing annotated translations of the remaining Shakespeare plays, but also of other texts in the English canon;

2. articulating the group's concerns with those of other similarly minded academics, through the recently drafted agreements with their departments and research centres - namely, at the universities of Berlin (FU), Utrecht and Murcia; this will also involve exploring the affinities between this project and the Socrates IP "Shakespeare and European Culture: Texts and Images Across Borders", expected to have its first edition at Universidade do Porto in 2008;

3. participation of team members in leading conferences, especially but not exclusively those organised by the International Shakespeare Association, the Shakespeare Institute, the steering committee of the European Shakespeare Association, and SEDERI;

4. regularly organising conferences; foremost example: in 2010 the group plans to organise "Shakespeare, Canon and Translation: the Bard's Afterlives";

5. publishing papers in refereed journals and as contributions to edited collections of criticism;

6. substantially contributing to the unit's website, by posting both papers that illustrate the group's research output, and extracts of published translations;

7. continuing the practice of publicising the research group's output to non-academic audiences, as in the extramural events recently promoted in connection with the Shakespeare translation project.

Team Members António Maria Maciel Castro Feijó Filomena Maria Esteves Aguiar de Vasconcelos Gualter Mendes Queiroz Cunha Manuel Gomes da Torre Maria Cândida de Carvalho Dias Zamith Silva Maria de Fátima de Sousa Basto Vieira de Melo Costa Nuno Manuel Dias Pinto Ribeiro Rui Manuel Gomes de Carvalho Homem Teresa Sofia Cardoso Louro Other Researchers Carla Pires Jorge Miguel Bastos da Silva Maria João da Rocha Afonso

Manuel Gomes da Torre Manuel Gomes da Torre