Description
Book SynopsisZaynab, first published in 1913, is widely cited as the first Arabic novel, yet the previous eight decades saw hundreds of novels translated into Arabic from English and French. This vast literary corpus influenced generations of Arab writers but has, until now, been considered a curious footnote in the genre''s history. Incorporating these works into the history of the Arabic novel, Stranger Fictions offers a transformative new account of modern Arabic literature, world literature, and the novel.
Rebecca C. Johnson rewrites the history of the global circulation of the novel by moving Arabic literature from the margins of comparative literature to its center. Considering the wide range of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century translation practicesincluding bad translation, mistranslation, and pseudotranslationJohnson argues that Arabic translators did far more than copy European works; they authored new versions of them, producing sophisticated theorizations of
Trade Review
A timely theoretical contribution to comparative literature's recent turn to translation and shift away from Eurocentrism. With a deep understanding of the material circuits of production and dissemination, Johnson draws on a vast archive of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts and critical debates. This transnational history of the novel is radical not only for orienting readers away from paradigms of national development precipitated by anticolonialism, but also because it develops important theoretical tools from within Arabic literature.
* Critical Inquiry *
This judicious and perceptive critical study is a welcome addition to the scholarship since the early 2000s that has scrutinized the chronology and nature of the beginnings of the Arabic novel in the nineteenth century.
* Modern Language Quartely *
This judicious and perceptive critical study is a welcome addition to the scholarship. Stranger Fictions argues that, contrary to accepted belief, translations of Western novels into Arabic record with uncanny precision and prescience the transformations brought by modernity and modernization into the Middle East.
* Modern Langauge Quarterly *
Johnson jettisons the static and narrow view of translation as direct transfer beholden to standards of 'fidelity' in favor of a dynamic and expansive understanding of translation that includes cultural adaptation, rewriting, and mistranslation. Beyond its necessary and important work of rethinking the origins of the Arabic novel translationally and transnationally, Stranger Fictions also has much to offer to literary scholars on similar trajectories of textual recovery and revisionist historiography in the lesser-studied languages.
* International Journal of Middle East Studies *
Stranger Fictions is an important contribution to the arena of Arabic literary history in general, and particularly to nahdawī studies. It is well-positioned to serve as an influential piece of literary criticism among the broader community of scholars working in European and comparative literatures.
* Journal of Arabic Studies *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: A History of the Novel in Mistranslation
Part One: Reading in Translation
1. Crusoe's Babel, Missionaries' Mistakes: Translated Origins of the Arabic Novel
2. Stranger Publics: The Structural Translation of the Print Sphere
3. Errant Readers: The Serialized Novel's Modern Subject
Part Two: The Transnational Imagination
4. Fictions of Connectivity: Dumas's World in Translation
5. The Novel in the Age of the Comparative World Picture: Jules Verne's Colonial Worlds
6. The Melodramatic State: Popular Translation and the Erring Nation
Conclusion: Invader Fictions: National Literature after Translation
