For information about my book, Estranging the Novel, look here!
Most Recent Work
- “Pełna podziwu,” Konteksty Kultury 21.1 (2024), 16-17. An essay (in Polish) about writing on Polish literature for an audience outside of Poland.
- “Introduction: Ihara Saikaku and Eighteenth-Century Studies,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 53 (2024), 3-6. The introduction for a cluster of essays on Ihara Saikaku (which were part of a panel that I organized at ASECS in 2023), arguing for the need to globalize eighteenth-century studies.
- “The Daily Ledger” Digital Defoe Studies. A brief reflection on Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and the things I did and did not write during the pandemic.
- “Modern Transit: A History of Feeling in the Polish People’s Republic.” Field Reports, Modernism/modernity. A book review of Maluchem do Raju, by Kazik Kunicki and Tomasz Ławecki, that is also a meditation on how we understanding history, especially of the 20th century.
- “Two Paths for the Big Book: Olga Tokarczuk’s Shifting Voice,” Genre 54.1 (2021), pgs. 67-87. An essay on two of Olga Tokarczuk’s novels, Flights and Books of Jacob, focusing specifically on the use of free indirect discourse as a way to represent a world.
- A reflection on the idea of world literature in the Cold War era, written as a response to Gloria Fisk’s wonderful Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature.
Book Reviews
The Story of Fictional Truth, by Paul Dawson, and The Natural Laws of Plot, by Yoon Sun Lee, for Eighteenth-Century Studies 57.4 (Summer 2024).
My Life’s Travels and Adventures: An Eighteenth-Century Oculist in the Ottoman Empire and the European Hinterland, by Regina Salomea Pilsztynowa, translated and edited by Władysław Roczniak, for The Polish Review 69.3 (October 2024).
Without the Novel, by Scott Black, Worlds Enough, by Elaine Freedgood, The Order of Forms, by Anna Kornbluh, Failures of Feeling, by Wendy Anne Lee, for Eighteenth-Century Life 48.2 (2024)
A Defense of Judgment, by Michael Clune, for Critical Inquiry (August 2021).
Born Yesterday: Inexperience and the Early Realist Novel, by Stephanie Insley Hershinow, for Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 33.1 (Fall 2020).
Earlier publications
- “ASECS and V21: Collective Ways Forward”, co-authored with Eugienia Zuroski. A response to a cluster of essays from a panel we organized for ASECS, on whether 18th-century studied needs its own V21.
- A reflection and responses for a V21 Book Collation on Elaine Auyoung’s When Fiction Feels Real: Representation and the Reading Mind.
- “Adam Smith’s Problems: Sympathy in Owenson’s Wild Irish Girl and Edgeworth’s Ennui,” New Hibernia Review 17.3 (2013). An essay on the marriage plots in two Irish Tales and how they illustrate the limitations of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke’s philosophical theories of sympathy. One of my favorite things that I’ve written.
- “The Self in Non-fiction: Eva Hoffman’s Autobiographical Project”. Life Writing, vol 2 (2005), 3-17. A chapter from the undergraduate thesis on exile and autobiography that I wrote at Reed College. Sometimes I worry that I peaked early…
Earlier published work related to Estranging the Novel:
“Constructing a Case: Reflections on Comparative Studies, World Literature, and Theories of the Novel’s Emergence,” Comparative Literature, 69:3 (September 2017). An article that discusses some of the methodological issues that ultimately didn’t make it into Estranging the Novel. Noting the striking resemblance between Jan Potocki’s Manuscript Found in Saragossa and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, I discuss different approaches to reading them comparatively, as a way of articulating some of the problems with historicist work on “minor” literatures.
“From Fantastic to Familiar: Jan Potocki’s Manuscript Found in Saragossa,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 37:4 (2015). An essay on Jan Potocki’s Manuscript Found in Saragossa, and how its networked stories examine the nature of fictionality — ideas I revisited and developed in the second chapter of Estranging the Novel.
“Sincerely Ironic: Romance at the Edges of Europe,” in Where Motley is Worn: Transnational Irish Literature, edited by Moira Casey and Amanda Tucker. Cork University Press: 2014. My first essay really theorizing the Polish-Irish comparison, with discussions of Martia Wirtemberska’s Malwina and Lady Morgan’s The Wild Irish Girl.
“Persuasive Ironies: Utopian Readings of Swift and Krasicki,” Comparative Literature Studies, 50.4 (2013), 618-642. An early version of what became the first chapter of Estranging the Novel, on utopian fiction, examining Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Ignacy Krasicki’s Mikołaja Doświadczyńskiego przypadki.
If you are unable to access one of these texts and would like a copy, please don’t hesitate to email me.
Kasia Reads 