Estranging the Novel - by Katarzyna Bartoszyń & ska (Paperback)

About the Book

By modeling such a heterogeneous account of the novel form, Estranging the Novel paves the way for a bracing and diverse understanding of the makeup of contemporary world literature and the many texts it encompasses--and a new perspective on the British novel as well.

Book Synopsis

To 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 America

For 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 Bartoszyńska explores how the emergence and growth of world literature studies has challenged the centrality of British fiction to theories of the novel's rise. She argues that a historicist approach frequently reinforces the realist paradigm that has cast other traditions as "minor," conceding a normative vision of the novel as it seeks to explain why historical forces produced different forms elsewhere. Recasting the standard narrative by looking at different novelistic literary forms, including the Gothic, travel writing, and queer fiction, Bartoszyńska offers a compelling comparative study of Polish and Irish works published across the long nineteenth century that emphasize fictionality, or the problem of world-building in literature.

Reading works by Ignacy Krasicki, Jan Potocki, Narcyza Żmichowska, and Witold Gombrowicz alongside others by Jonathan Swift, Charles Maturin, Oscar Wilde, and Samuel Beckett, Bartoszyńska shows that the history of the novel's rise demands a more capacious and rigorous approach to form as well as a reconceptualization of the relationship between fiction and its cultural contexts. By modeling such a heterogeneous account of the novel form, Estranging the Novel paves the way for a bracing and diverse understanding of the makeup of contemporary world literature and the many texts it encompasses--and a new perspective on the British novel as well.

Review Quotes

Estranging 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.

-- "Eighteenth-Century Fiction"

...convincing and extremely interesting.

-- "Slavic Review"

[Bartoszyńska] 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 History"

Bartoszyńska performs a great service by analyzing the works of writers who have been rarely, if ever, discussed together. This, alone, is enough to make this an engaging read.

-- "The Polish Revew"

Bartoszyńska'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.

-- "Genre"

For 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 Novel"

The 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. [Bartoszyńska] 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.

-- "Modern Language Review"

This 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.

-- "Novel: A Forum on Fiction"

About the Author

Katarzyna Bartoszyńska is an assistant professor of English and women's and gender studies at Ithaca College.