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.
Tarek El-Ariss, Dartmouth College, author of Trials of Arab Modernity:
Theorizing the rise of the Arabic novel in the nineteenth century, this sophisticated and erudite book deconstructs the naha as a process of homogenization tied to a monolingual national model and engages it instead as a series of multilingual and heterogenous trials, translations, debates, events, and cultural productions. This is a groundbreaking contribution to modernity studies, translation studies, and world literature—and to Arabic and comparative literature.
Tanya Agathocleous, Hunter College, author of Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century:
Stranger Fictions is impressively well researched. Engaging with literary works about which little has been written thus far, it makes a bold intervention in its field by demonstrating that Arabic translations are central to our understanding of the period of European colonialism and of the novel as a form more broadly.
Margaret Litvin, Boston University, author of Hamlet's Arab Journey:
Stranger Fictions establishes Rebecca C. Johnson as a brilliant reader, a generous and witty writer, and a compelling interpreter of world literary history. Each page not only scintillates with insight but sparkles with fun, a fitting tribute to the passionate and omnicurious nineteenth-century Arab litterateurs this book brings to life.
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.
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.
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.
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.