The Politics of Canonicity sheds new light on the dynamics of canon formation in modern Hebrew literature. It explores the ways in which literary culture--as site and as tool--participates in the production of national identity. The aesthetic paradigms, political ideologies, and social interests that privilege certain texts and literary modes are reexamined within the framework of the conscious and deliberate practices of Zionism to formulate a national discourse. As the author shows, the suppressed, the marginal, the undesired "others" of the nation demonstrate the limits of both...