Estranging the Novel

"At last! A comparative history of the novel, reading western with eastern Europe: Irish and Polish novels in illuminating dialogue over the picaresque and the fantastic, utopias, queer aestheticism, meta-modernism. These novels, Bartoszyńska demonstrates, create interlaced worlds."—Katie Trumpener, Yale University, author of Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire

"Estranging the Novel is an original, lucid, and compelling contribution to the study of the novel as a capacious, formally various, and geographically wide genre. The book is beautifully conceived, clearly written, and thoroughly explicated."—Scott Black, University of Utah, author of Without the Novel: Romance and the History of Prose Fiction

"Bartoszyńska's alternative concept of novelistic mimesis is rich and thought-provoking. This is important and exciting work, and our sense of world literature will be the better for it."—Marta Figlerowicz, Yale University, author of Spaces of Feeling: Affect and Awareness in Modernist Literature

"[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

"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