Offering a profound re-assessment of the conceptual, rhetorical,
and cultural intersections among sexuality, race and religion in
English Renaissance texts, this study argues that antisemitism is a
by-product of tensions between received Classical conceptions of
masculinity and Christianity's strident critique of that ideal.
Utilizing works by Shakespeare, Milton, Marlowe and others,
Biberman illustrates how modern antisemitism develops as a way to
stigmatize hypermasculine behavior, thus facilitating the
transformation of the culture's gender ideal from knight to
businessman. Subsequently, the function of antisemitism changes,
becoming instead the mark of effeminate behavior. Consequently, the
central antisemitic image changes from Jew-Devil to Jew-Sissy.
Biberman traces this shift's repercussions, both in renaissance
culture and what followed it. He also contends that as a result of
this linkage between Jewishness and the limits of masculine
behavior, the image of the Jewish woman remains especially
unstable. In concluding, Biberman argues that the Gothic resurrects
the Jew-Devil (bequeathing it to the Nazis), and that the horror
genre is often a rewriting of Renaissance discourse about Jews. In
the course of making this larger argument, Biberman introduces a
series of more limited claims that challenge the conventional
wisdom within the field of literary studies. First, Biberman
overturns the assumption that Jewishness and femininity are always
associated in the cultural imagination of Western Europe. Second,
Biberman provides the historical context needed to understand the
emergence of the stereotype of the pathological Jewish woman.
Third, Biberman revises the incorrect notion that divorce was not
practiced in Renaissance England. Fourth, Biberman argues for the
novel claim that serial monogamy in Western culture is a practice
understood to possess a Jewish "taint." Fifth, Biberman contributes
a major advance in scholarship devoted to T. S. Eliot, illustrating
how Eliot's famous critical argument against Milton is an
expression of his antisemitism, and a coherent compliment to the
antisemitic touches in his poetry. Sixth, in his discussion of
Gothic literature, Biberman introduces novel readings of
Frankenstein and Dracula, persuasively arguing that Mary Shelley's
monster bears the mark of the Jew according to modern antisemitic
discourse; and that, in Stoker, both the vampire and the
vampire-killer represent Jews executing a scenario of self-policing
that was realized in the ghettos and the concentration camps.
Biberman's final contribution in this study is to provide a
definition for postmodern antisemitism and to apply it to various
contemporary incidents, including September 11th and the
Arab-Israeli conflict.
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