Author: Bryan Cheyette
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521558778
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
Combining cultural theory, discourse analysis and new historicism with readings of the works of major contemporary authors, this study concludes that "the Jew" is characterized unstereotypically as the embodiment of uncertainty within English literature and society.
Author: Naomi Hetherington
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351272357
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1478
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Book Description
This four-volume historical resource provides new opportunities for investigating the relationship between religion, literature and society in Britain and its imperial territories by making accessible a diverse selection of harder-to-find primary sources. These include religious fiction, poetry, essays, memoirs, sermons, travel writing, religious ephemera, unpublished notebooks and pamphlet literature. Spanning the long nineteenth century (c.1789–1914), the resource departs from older models of ‘the Victorian crisis of faith’ in order to open up new ways of conceptualising religion. A key concern of the resource is to integrate non-Christian religions into our understanding and representations of religious life in this period. Each volume is framed around a different meaning of the term ‘religion’. Volume one on ‘Traditions’ offers an overview of the different religious traditions and denominations present in Britain in this period. Volume two on ‘Mission and Reform’ considers the social and political importance of religious faith and practice as expressed through foreign and domestic mission and philanthropic and political movements at home and abroad. Volume three turns to ‘Religious Feeling’ as an important and distinct category for understanding the ways in which religion is embodied and expressed in culture. Volume four on ‘Disbelief and New Beliefs’ explores the transformation of the religious landscape of Britain and its imperial territories during the nineteenth century as a result of key cultural and intellectual forces. The resource is aimed primarily at researchers and students working within the fields of literature and social and religious history. It supplies an interpretative context for sources in the form of explanatory headnotes to each source or group of sources and volume introductions that explore overarching themes. Each volume can be read independently, but they work together to elucidate the complex and multi-faceted nature of nineteenth-century religious life.
Author: Neil R. Davison
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521636209
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
Representations of 'the Jew' have long been a topic of interest in Joyce studies. Neil Davison argues that Joyce's lifelong encounter with pseudo-scientific, religious and political discourse about 'the Jew' forms a unifying component of his career. Davison offers new biographical material, and presents a detailed reading of Ulysses showing how Joyce draws on Christian folklore, Dreyfus Affair propaganda, Sinn Fein politics, and theories of Jewish sexual perversion and financial conspiracy. Throughout, Joyce confronts the controversy of 'race', the psychology of internalised stereotype, and the contradictions of fin-de-siècle anti-Semitism.
Author: Simon Mayers
Publisher: Simon Mayers
ISBN: 1490392467
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 131
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Book Description
G. K. Chesterton was a journalist and prolific author of poems, novels, short stories, travel books and social criticism. Prior to the twentieth century, Chesterton expressed sympathy for Jews and hostility towards antisemitism. He was agitated by Russian pogroms and felt sympathy for Captain Dreyfus. However, early into the twentieth century, he developed an irrational fear about the presence of Jews in Christian society. He started to argue that it was the Jews who oppressed the Russians rather than the Russians who oppressed the Jews, and he suggested that Dreyfus was not as innocent as the English newspapers claimed. His caricatures of Jews were often that of grotesque creatures masquerading as English people. His fictional and his journalistic works repeated anti-Jewish stereotypes of Jewish greed and usury, bolshevism, cowardice, disloyalty and secrecy. This concise book (125 pages) provides a focused yet easily-accessible examination of these stereotypes and caricatures in Chesterton’s discourse. It also examines Chesterton’s discussion of the so-called “Jewish Problem”, his belief that “every Jew” should be made to wear distinctive clothing, the claim that Chesterton could not have been antisemitic because Israel Zangwill was his friend, and the claim that the Wiener Library defended him from the charge of antisemitism.
Author: Bryan Cheyette
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780521443555
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
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.
Author: S. Spector
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113705574X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295
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Book Description
British Romanticism and the Jews explores the mutual influences exerted by the British-Christian and British-Jewish communities on each other during the period between the Enlightenment and Victorianism. The essays in the volume demonstrate how the texts produced by the Jewish Enlightenment provided a significant resource for romantic intellectual revisionism, in much the same way that British romanticism provided the cultural basis through which the British-Jewish community was able to negotiate between the competing obligations to ethnicity and nationalism.
Author: Ferenc Laczo
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311055934X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 363
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Book Description
Catastrophe and Utopia studies the biographical trajectories, intellectual agendas, and major accomplishments of select Jewish intellectuals during the age of Nazism, and the partly simultaneous, partly subsequent period of incipient Stalinization. By focusing on the relatively underexplored region of Central and Eastern Europe – which was the primary centre of Jewish life prior to the Holocaust, served as the main setting of the Nazi genocide, but also had notable communities of survivors – the volume offers significant contributions to a European Jewish intellectual history of the twentieth century. Approaching specific historical experiences in their diverse local contexts, the twelve case studies explore how Jewish intellectuals responded to the unprecedented catastrophe, how they renegotiated their utopian commitments and how the complex relationship between the two evolved over time. They analyze proximate Jewish reactions to the most abysmal discontinuity represented by the Judeocide while also revealing more subtle lines of continuity in Jewish thinking. Ferenc Laczó is assistant professor in History at Maastricht University and Joachim von Puttkamer is professor of Eastern European History at Friedrich Schiller University Jena and director of the Imre Kertész Kolleg.
Author: Efraim Sicher
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498527795
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 323
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Book Description
A new approach to thinking about the representation of the Other in Western society, The Jew’s Daughter: A Cultural History of a Conversion Narrative offers an insight into the gendered difference of the Jew. Focusing on a popular narrative of “The Jew’s Daughter,” which has been overlooked in conventional studies of European anti-Semitism, this innovative study looks at canonical and neglected texts which have constructed racialized and sexualized images that persist today in the media and popular culture. The book goes back before Shylock and Jessica in TheMerchant of Venice and Isaac and Rebecca in Ivanhoe to seek the answers to why the Jewish father is always wicked and ugly, while his daughter is invariably desirable and open to conversion. The story unfolds in fascinating transformations, reflecting changing ideological and social discourses about gender, sexuality, religion, and nation that expose shifting perceptions of inclusion and exclusion of the Other. Unlike previous studies of the theme of the Jewess in separate literatures, Sicher provides a comparative perspective on the transnational circulation of texts in the historical context of the perception of both Jews and women as marginal or outcasts in society. The book draws on examples from the arts, history, literature, folklore, and theology to draw a complex picture of the dynamics of Jewish-Christian relations in England, France, Germany, and Eastern Europe from 1100 to 2017. In addition, the responses of Jewish authors illustrate a dialogue that has not always led to mutual understanding. This ground-breaking work will provoke questions about the history and present state of prejudiced attitudes in our society.
Author: R. Langham
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230511384
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 163
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Book Description
For nearly a thousand years there has been a Jewish presence in Britain. Today the Jewish community, although numbering less than 300,000 is widely seen as one of the most successful groups in Britain. This unique book describes events in Britain concerning Jews in chronological order, from ancient legend to the present times.
Author: Cynthia M. Baker
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813563046
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
Jew. The word possesses an uncanny power to provoke and unsettle. For millennia, Jew has signified the consummate Other, a persistent fly in the ointment of Western civilization’s grand narratives and cultural projects. Only very recently, however, has Jew been reclaimed as a term of self-identification and pride. With these insights as a point of departure, this book offers a wide-ranging exploration of the key word Jew—a term that lies not only at the heart of Jewish experience, but indeed at the core of Western civilization. Examining scholarly debates about the origins and early meanings of Jew, Cynthia M. Baker interrogates categories like “ethnicity,” “race,” and “religion” that inevitably feature in attempts to define the word. Tracing the term’s evolution, she also illuminates its many contradictions, revealing how Jew has served as a marker of materialism and intellectualism, socialism and capitalism, worldly cosmopolitanism and clannish parochialism, chosen status, and accursed stigma. Baker proceeds to explore the complex challenges that attend the modern appropriation of Jew as a term of self-identification, with forays into Yiddish language and culture, as well as meditations on Jew-as-identity by contemporary public intellectuals. Finally, by tracing the phrase new Jews through a range of contexts—including the early Zionist movement, current debates about Muslim immigration to Europe, and recent sociological studies in the United States—the book provides a glimpse of what the word Jew is coming to mean in an era of Internet cultures, genetic sequencing, precarious nationalisms, and proliferating identities.
