Literary critics and cultural historians have for too long written the question of race out of mainstream accounts of English literature. In Constructions of "the Jew" in English Literature and Society Bryan Cheyette combines cultural theory, discourse analysis and new historicism with close readings of works by Arnold, Trollope and George Eliot, Buchan and Kipling, Shaw and Wells, Belloc and Chesterton, T. S. Eliot and Joyce to argue that the Jew lies at the heart of modern English literature and society: not as a stereotype, but as the embodiment of confusion and indeterminacy.

Contemporary Jewish Writing in Britain and Ireland presents a wide range of writers-some at the heart of British culture, others outside the mainstream-who address the issue of Jewish cultural difference in Great Britain and Ireland. Editor Bryan Cheyette has assembled a striking roster of writers whose extraordinary imagination and understanding of Jewish experience in Britain and Ireland have transformed English literature in recent decades. They include established figures like Anita Brookner, Harold Pinter, and George Steiner, as well as such vibrant new voices as Elena Lappin, Jonathan...

This collection of essays examines various representations of -the Jew- in British and American literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It analyzes in detail the literary racism and antisemitism of some of the most important and influential writers of this period, including Dickens, Trollope, James, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Woolf, and Orwell, as well as such marginal figures as Dorothy Richardson, Stevie Smith, and Michael Gold. The contributors are all well-known Anglo-American literary, cultural, or feminist critics; some have written extensively on literary racism or...

This book provides a rich and wide-ranging analysis of Jewish history and culture, relating them to theories of modernity and postmodernity and to recent debates on ethnicity and postcolonialism. Issues addressed include psychoanalysis and gender, literary anti-semitism, (post)modernity and 'the Jew', and the memory of the Holocaust. A Foreword by Homi Bhabha and an Afterword by Paul Gilroy place these concerns in an extended multicultural and postcolonial context.


The book examines the work of past and present cultural theorists who have placed the figure of 'the Jew' at...

This collection of essays explores the complex articulations and contexts of anti-Semitism in the literature of four cultures - Britain, Germany, France and Italy - in the long nineteenth century. The essays examine the presence both of explicitly anti-Semitic writing and apparently anti-Jewish stereotypes in the work of writers who were not consciously hostile to Jews. The book scrutinizes assumptions about the relative absence of anti-Semitism in Britain, the image of Germany as resistant to Jewish assimilation, and of Italy as particularly hospitable to Jews. The essays are placed in a...

This collection of essays explores the complex articulations and contexts of anti-Semitism in the literature of four cultures - Britain, Germany, France and Italy - in the long nineteenth century. The essays examine the presence both of explicitly anti-Semitic writing and apparently anti-Jewish stereotypes in the work of writers who were not consciously hostile to Jews. The book scrutinizes assumptions about the relative absence of anti-Semitism in Britain, the image of Germany as resistant to Jewish assimilation, and of Italy as particularly hospitable to Jews. The essays are placed in a...

An exploration of changing cultural perceptions of Jewishness in contemporary writing. It examines how representations of Jewishness in contemporary fiction have wrestled with such topics as the Holocaust, Israeli-Palestinian relations and Jewish diaspora experiences.

How do great moments in literary traditions arise from times of intense social and political upheaval? South African Literature's Russian Soul charts the interplay of narrative innovation and political isolation in two of the world's most renowned non-European literatures. In this book, Jeanne-Marie Jackson demonstrates how Russian writing's "Golden Age ? in the troubled nineteenth-century has served as a model for South African writers both during and after apartheid. Exploring these two isolated literary cultures alongside each other, the book challenges the limits of "global"...

The Oxford History of the Novel in English is a 12-volume series presenting a comprehensive, global, and up-to-date history of English-language prose fiction and written by a large, international team of scholars. The series is concerned with novels as a whole, not just the 'literary' novel, and each volume includes chapters on the processes of production, distribution and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as outlining the work of major novelists, movements and tendencies.

This volume offers the fullest and most nuanced account available of the last...

Reading a wide range of novels from post-war Germany to Israeli, Palestinian and postcolonial writers, The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature is a comprehensive exploration of changing cultural perceptions of Jewishness in contemporary writing.

Examining how representations of Jewishness in contemporary fiction have wrestled with such topics as the Holocaust, Israeli-Palestinian relations and Jewish diaspora experiences, Isabelle Hesse demonstrates the 'colonial' turn taken by these representations since the founding of the Jewish state. Following the...