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Essays on the contribution of African, Caribbean, Asian and
diaspora writers to 'English' literature. The 'new' literatures
have most commonly been seen as a staging post en route to the
current 'post-colonial' era. Yet these literatures and the diverse
cultural histories they represent are older than such recent
interpretations of them. This collection of essays investigates
ways in which we can return to 'reading' these 'new' literatures
without falling back on current critical assumptions.
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 antisemitism, others are working in this area for the
first time.
The collection does not impose a schema or new orthodoxy, but
instead encourages a plurality of approaches to a difficult and
always contentious issue that has been demarcated into broadly
defined "politically correct" and "liberal humanist" positions.
Liberal humanism asserts that the ameliorating western canon has,
by definition, nothing to do with racism or antisemitism. Political
correctness wishes to exclude from the academy any literary text
deemed to reinforce oppressive stereotypes. This volume adopts
neither position, arguing instead that these two supposedly
antagonistic approaches are, in fact, mirror-images of each other.
A series of innovative critical studies introducing writers and
their contexts to a wide range of readers. Drawing upon the most
recent thinking in English studies, each book considers
biographical material, examines recent criticism, includes a
detailed bibliography, and offers a concise but challenging
reappraisal of a writer's major work.
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 antisemitism, others are working in this area for the
first time.
The collection does not impose a schema or new orthodoxy, but
instead encourages a plurality of approaches to a difficult and
always contentious issue that has been demarcated into broadly
defined "politically correct" and "liberal humanist" positions.
Liberal humanism asserts that the ameliorating western canon has,
by definition, nothing to do with racism or antisemitism. Political
correctness wishes to exclude from the academy any literary text
deemed to reinforce oppressive stereotypes. This volume adopts
neither position, arguing instead that these two supposedly
antagonistic approaches are, in fact, mirror-images of each other.
For three hundred years the ghetto defined Jewish culture in the
late medieval and early modern period in Western Europe. In the
nineteenth-century it was a free-floating concept which travelled
to Eastern Europe and the United States. Eastern European
"ghettos", which enabled genocide, were crudely rehabilitated by
the Nazis during World War Two as if they were part of a benign
medieval tradition. In the United States, the word ghetto was
routinely applied to endemic black ghettoization which has lasted
from 1920 until the present. Outside of America "the ghetto" has
been universalized as the incarnation of class difference, or
colonialism, or apartheid, and has been applied to segregated
cities and countries throughout the world. In this Very Short
Introduction Bryan Cheyette unpicks the extraordinarily complex
layers of contrasting meanings that have accrued over five hundred
years to ghettos, considering their different settings across the
globe. He considers core questions of why and when urban, racial,
and colonial ghettos have appeared, and who they contain. Exploring
their various identities, he shows how different ghettos
interrelate, or are contrasted, across time and space, or even in
the same place. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions
series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in
almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect
way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors
combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to
make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
"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 Treitel, and Jonathan Wilson. As Cheyette argues, "the
contemporary British-Jewish writers in this volume defy the
authority of England and the Anglo-Jewish community. . . . [All]
are risk-takers who . . . will eventually help replace narrow
national narratives and gendered identities with a broader, more
plural, diasporic culture."
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 comparative framework in order to examine
the representation of Jews both within particular national cultures
and in the context of Western European modernity. The volume
considers the ways in which anti-Semitism functioned within liberal
culture in the nineteenth century as part of the broader history of
oppression with which Western modernity has been complicit.
Literary critics and cultural historians have for too long written
the question of race out of mainstream accounts of English
literature. In this work, Bryan Cheyette draws on a wide range of
literary texts and social and political perspectives from the 1870s
to the 1940s to show that the emerging cultural identity of modern
England involved constructing Jews both as a force that could be
transformed by a superior culture, and as a race outside the
English nation. Dr Cheyette combines cultural theory, discourse
analysis and new historicism with close readings of work 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 fixed stereotype, but as the embodiment of confusion and
indeterminacy.
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