Description
Book SynopsisTo develop a theory of world literature, this book demands that the theory of the novel can no longer ignore literary forms other than realism. Winner of the Donald Murphy Prize for a Distinguished First Book by the American Conference on Irish Studies, and the Waclaw Lednicki Award in the Humanities by the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of AmericaFor centuries, the standard account of the development of the novel focused on the rise of realism in English literature. Studies of early novels connected the form to various aspects of British life across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the burgeoning middle class, the growth of individualism, and the emergence of democracy and the nation-state. But as the push for teaching and learning global literature grows, this narrative is insufficient for studying novel forms outside of a predominately English-speaking British and American realm. In Estranging the Novel, Katarzyna Bartoszynska explores how the emergence
Trade Review[Bartoszynska] uses an impressively wide-ranging analytic toolkit in her readings with recurring tropes such as metafictionality, irony, ekphrasis, temporality, the role of prefaces and footnotes....Not only does her book estrange the idea of the novel, but it also makes us think about the ruts we are stuck in when approaching literary works from different traditions.
—Kasia Szymanska,
Literature and HistoryFor the researcher, the way this book continually presses against insufficient accounts of the novel is invigorating. So too, the close readings are clearly written by a scholar who loves the capacities of fiction in all their complexity. As a scholar and reader, for me this book's biggest payoff was its sustained discussion of worlding—specifically, via Eric Hayot, of the ways that occluded complexities of fiction bring new possibilities of thought into being.
—Daniel Dewispelare,
Studies in the NovelThe wider implication of the analysis in
Estranging the Novel is that we need an account of novels which are 'anomalous or strange' that considers their strangeness on its own terms rather than how it accords with or departs from a single history of the nove...l. [Bartoszynska] provides a compelling call for a new way of thinking about the novel's history and form, and the role of peripheral literatures within it.
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Modern Language ReviewEstranging the Novel is a highly original attempt to offer an alternative method for the study of the novel by juxtaposing texts derived from Polish and Irish novelistic traditions.
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Eighteenth-Century FictionThis book would be an important contribution to novel studies for the novels it studies alone....Reading this book not only helped me realize what I miss in knowing so little about Polish literature and not being able to read the Polish language, but it also helped me speculate about all the other things I did not know about novels and world literature.
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Novel: A Forum on FictionBartoszynska's book is overall a lucid and captivating study...
Estranging the Novel will reward readers who are searching for a thoughtful conversation with the most recent updates in theories of world literature.
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Genre...convincing and extremely interesting.
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Slavic ReviewTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Unreal Histories
1. The Problem with Happily Ever After: Swift and Krasicki
2. The Terror of Worlds Unfolding: Potocki and Maturin
3. Queer Tales and Seductive Paintings: Zmichowska and Wilde
4. Impossibly Free: Gombrowicz and Beckett
Conclusion: Toward a "Weak" Theory of the Novel
Notes
