Genealogical Fictions

"Jobst Welge's impressive new book . . . argues deftly for an intimate relation between national geography and historical narrative."—Talia Schaffer, Times Literary Supplement

"One of the most significant critical works about the European/American novel since Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957)."—Choice

"Jobst Welge's observation of the centrality of genealogical fictions to the question of national identity—and the potential this concept has for clarifying problems of peripheral modernities and their relation to or inflection of the novelistic form—is highly original and will be of great interest to the field, particularly to scholars focusing on the history of the novel in the European tradition. The author demonstrates fluency in a wide array of Western literary traditions; he is a true comparativist, with the ability to work equally closely on Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and English texts. This book should be required reading for any comparativist approach to the history of the novel."—William Egginton, Johns Hopkins University

"Genealogical Fictions is a mature, distinguished contribution to the history of the novel that establishes Welge as one of the leading comparativists of his generation. It is a work whose brilliance lies in its impressive scope and patiently constructed, historically informed, compelling arguments regarding the role of genealogy and family history in the modern novel from the United Kingdom to Brazil to Italy to Spain."—Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Harvard University, coauthor of The Library Beyond the Book

"Though all of the texts considered are written from an (embattled) periphery, none ultimately adopts a posture that is merely melancholic, nostalgic, or politically reactionary. In Welge's hands, and considered as a corpus, they are shown instead to speak back in complicating ways to nineteenth century master narratives of modernity, the nation-state, and the bourgeoisie."—Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature