This paper details the ways in which contemporary translation studies inform graduate-level study of nineteenth-century literature as cultural history. It examines the way ideas of translation, and the powerplay between the original author and the translator, can manifest themselves in other forms of writing, such as editing and reviewing, and also addresses ideas of cultural translation in travel writing and fiction set in the foreign place. Through this course, students are taught to identify cultural hybridity in the narrative, as well as the ways writers contend with alternative ideological structures through the creative process of translation.