In Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature, Katarzyna Bartoszyńska studies strange novels from Poland and Ireland to question histories of the novel that emphasize the rise of realism. Instead of thinking about what these novels are—realist or romance, Polish or Irish, fact or fiction—she considers what these novels do. In the process, she offers a compelling formalist analysis of Polish and Irish novels that demonstrates the novel's wide-ranging “capabilities” (12) and advances a new “weak theory” of the novel that focuses on fictionality rather than realism or history (14).
This book would be an important contribution to novel studies for the novels it studies alone. Polish and Irish novels are both “minor” forms. They are misplaced within narratives of the novel's linear rise—understood to be peripheral and anomalous. Scholars of Polish literature, Bartoszyńska explains, attribute the Polish novel's strange forms to, on the one hand,...
