Originally published in 1900 and set in fin-de-siecle California, Heirs of Yesterday by Emma Wolf (1865-1932) uses a love story to explore topics such as familial loyalty, the conflict between American individualism and ethno-religious heritage, and anti-Semitism in the United States. The introduction, co-authored by Barbara Cantalupo and Lori Harrison-Kahan, includes biographical background on Wolf based on new research and explores key literary, historical, and religious contexts for Heirs of Yesterday. It incorporates background on the rise of Reform Judaism and the late nineteenth-century Jewish community in San Francisco, while also considering Wolf's relationship to the broader literary movement of realism and to other writers of her time. As Cantalupo and Harrison-Kahan demonstrate, the publication history and reception of Heirs of Yesterday illuminate competing notions of Jewish American identity at the turn of the twentieth century. Compared to the familiar ghetto tales penned by Yiddish-speaking, Eastern European immigrant writers, Heirs of Yesterday offers a very different narrative about turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jewish life in the United States. The novel's central characters, physician Philip May and pianist Jean Willard, are not striving immigrants in the process of learning English and becoming American. Instead, they are native-born citizens who live in the middle-class community of San Francisco's Pacific Heights, where they interact socially and professionally with their gentile peers. Tailored for students, scholars, and readers of women's studies, Jewish studies, and American literature and history, this new edition of Heirs of Yesterday highlights the art, historical value, and controversial nature of Wolf's work.

The essays in this collection were originally presented as talks at the Poe Studies Association's Third International Edgar Allan Poe Conference: The Bicentennial in October 2009. All the essays in this volume deal with Poe's influence on authors from the United States and abroad; in addition, the collection also includes two examples of primary texts by contemporary authors whose work is directly related to Poe's work or life: an interview with Japanese detective novelist Kiyoshi Kasai and poems by Charles Cantalupo. This volume includes interpretative essays on international authors whose work reflects back on Poe s work: Edogawa Rampo from Japan; Lu Xun from China; Fernando Pessoa, Eca de Queiros and Ramalho Ortigao from Portugal; Angela Carter from England; and Nikolai Gogol from Russia. The essays in this collection complement and extend a project begun by Lois Vines' Poe Abroad (University of Iowa Press, 1999) and take a wider perspective on Poe's influence with essays on Poe's impact on American authors William Faulkner, Mary Oliver, Joyce Carol Oates, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Harriet Jacobs."

The essays in this collection were originally presented as talks at the Poe Studies Association's Third International Edgar Allan Poe Conference: The Bicentennial in October 2009. All the essays in this volume deal with Poe's influence on authors from the United States and abroad; in addition, the collection also includes two examples of primary texts by contemporary authors whose work is directly related to Poe's work or life: an interview with Japanese detective novelist Kiyoshi Kasai and poems by Charles Cantalupo. This volume includes interpretative essays on international authors whose work reflects back on Poe s work: Edogawa Rampo from Japan; Lu Xun from China; Fernando Pessoa, Eca de Queiros and Ramalho Ortigao from Portugal; Angela Carter from England; and Nikolai Gogol from Russia. The essays in this collection complement and extend a project begun by Lois Vines' Poe Abroad (University of Iowa Press, 1999) and take a wider perspective on Poe's influence with essays on Poe's impact on American authors William Faulkner, Mary Oliver, Joyce Carol Oates, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Harriet Jacobs."

Originally published in 1900 and set in fin-de-siecle California, Heirs of Yesterday by Emma Wolf (1865-1932) uses a love story to explore topics such as familial loyalty, the conflict between American individualism and ethno-religious heritage, and anti-Semitism in the United States. The introduction, co-authored by Barbara Cantalupo and Lori Harrison-Kahan, includes biographical background on Wolf based on new research and explores key literary, historical, and religious contexts for Heirs of Yesterday. It incorporates background on the rise of Reform Judaism and the late nineteenth-century Jewish community in San Francisco, while also considering Wolf's relationship to the broader literary movement of realism and to other writers of her time. As Cantalupo and Harrison-Kahan demonstrate, the publication history and reception of Heirs of Yesterday illuminate competing notions of Jewish American identity at the turn of the twentieth century. Compared to the familiar ghetto tales penned by Yiddish-speaking, Eastern European immigrant writers, Heirs of Yesterday offers a very different narrative about turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jewish life in the United States. The novel's central characters, physician Philip May and pianist Jean Willard, are not striving immigrants in the process of learning English and becoming American. Instead, they are native-born citizens who live in the middle-class community of San Francisco's Pacific Heights, where they interact socially and professionally with their gentile peers. Tailored for students, scholars, and readers of women's studies, Jewish studies, and American literature and history, this new edition of Heirs of Yesterday highlights the art, historical value, and controversial nature of Wolf's work.

A timely reissue of Emma Wolf's 1892 novel, which boldly interrogates the implications of Jewish-Christian marriage and examines the role of the "new woman" within the traditions of the Jewish home.

Widely regarded as a literary genius in her day, the Jewish American author Emma Wolf (1865 -- 1932) wrote vivid stories that penetrated the struggles of women and people of faith, particularly Jews, at the turn of the twentieth century. Although polio confined Wolf to her home during most of her adult life, she drew on her sisters' everyday experiences as working women, mothers, homemakers, and lovers to create stories filled with immediacy and insight during a time of rapid social change. This reissue of the 1916 revised edition of one of her most popular novels, Other Things Being Equal, first published in 1892, introduces Wolf to a new generation of readers, immersing them in an interfaith love story set in her native San Francisco in the late nineteenth century.

The novel's protagonist, Ruth Levice, a young intellectual from an upper-class Jewish family, meets Dr. Herbert Kemp, a Unitarian, and falls in love. Raised to act on her own judgment, Ruth nonetheless respects the wisdom of her elders -- but her father's inability to sanction her relationship with Kemp becomes a challenge for Ruth on many levels.

The novel's force lies in its unwillingness to adhere to ideological stands. A woman need not give up marriage and home to be strong, independent, and unconventional; a Jew does not have to be orthodox to remain close to her heritage and her faith. Wolf's novel also brings a nuanced perspective to major women's issues of the day, such as the "rest cure, " a health measurecondemned by feminists at the time as a patriarchic attempt to control women.

Intermarriage, assimilation, demands of modernity of family life -- these are all topics that come under scrutiny in Wolf's novel and that have broad resonance for readers today. Readers will also enjoy the romance and poetry of a novel described by one critic as "unprecedented in American fiction in rendering the sensuality that contested religious proscriptions."