Reading Novels Translingually

This book analyzes how literary fiction depicts multilingual worlds by incorporating multiple languages into the text. Taking as case studies several contemporary novels as well as Leo Tolstoy’s nineteenth-century classic War and Peace, it explores how reading becomes a translingual process. This book examines how literary fiction depicts multilingual practices and incorporates them on the level of the text. Multiple languages surround us today, rendered more visible in the digital and globalized age. In literature, too, languages intermingle, often to striking effect. The early twenty-first century has seen a new fascination with the age-old phenomena of literary multilingualism and translation on the part of writers and readers alike. In case studies of contemporary novels by Rabih Alameddine, Olga Grushin, Olga Grjasnowa, Michael Idov, Zinaida Lindén, Andreï Makine, and Eugene Vodolazkin, as well as a new look at Leo Tolstoy’s nineteenth-century classic War and Peace, this book shows how reading can become a translingual process.