In the prevailing narrative about modern Arabic literature, the latter emerges when writers free themselves from the shackles of traditional forms, such as the maqama and the qasida, and adopt the new forms of the West, notably the novel and short story, and later on and to a lesser extent, free verse. However, this formalist vision of Arabic literature is both reductive and eurocentric, and it fails to account for the complex relationship that Arabic literature maintained with European works, not only mimicking, but rewriting, parodying, and reinventing them. From the mid-nineteenth century to the second decade of the twentieth, the tension between budding nationalisms and European imperialism has translated into works that grapple with themes of familiarity and estrangement, self and other. In this paper, I analyze strangeness and estrangement through narratives of spatial alienation. This motif first manifests in the mid-nineteenth century in Arabic literature in travel narratives and variations thereof, with a genealogy stretching back not only to al-Tahtawi and to European orientalists, but also to 'aja'ib writings in the pre-modern and early modern periods--and generating variations and parodies. Analyzing hybrid narratives inspired both by European travel writing and an Arab literary tradition of the picaresque, such as al-Shidyaq's al-Saq 'ala al-Saq, Taymur's Nata'ij al-Ahwal fi al-Aqwal wa al-Af'al, and al-Muwaylihi's Hadith 'Isa Ibn Hisham, I argue that the colonizer's gaze is reshaped into an aesthetic of the bizarre as well as a metaphor for national alienation. Finally, far from dismissing these works as “embryonic” or attempts at novels, I make the case that they were paramount to the development of modern Arabic literature, and made possible the monumental novels of the twentieth century.