Anglophone Jewish Literature by Stähler, Axel;

Short description:

English has become the major language of contemporary Jewish literature. This book shows the transnational character of that literature and how traditional viewpoints need to be reassessed.

Long description:

Anglophone Jewish literature is not traditionally numbered among the new literatures in English. Rather, Jewish literary production in English has conventionally been classified as ‘hyphenated’ and has therefore not yet been subjected as such to the scrutiny of scholars of literary or cultural history.

The collection of essays addresses this lack and initiates the scholarly exploration of transnational and transcultural Anglophone Jewish literature as one of the New English Literatures. Without attempting to impose what would seem to be a misguided conceptual unity on the many-facetted field of Anglophone Jewish literature, the book is based on a plurality of theoretical frameworks. Alert to the productive friction between these discourses, which it aims to elicit, it confronts Jewish literary studies with postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and other contemporary theoretical frameworks.

Featuring contributions from among the best-known scholars in the fields of British and American Jewish literature, including Bryan Cheyette and Emily Miller Budick, this collection transcends borders of both nations and academic disciplines and takes into account cultural and historical affinities and differences of the Anglophone diaspora which have contributed to the formation and development of the English-language segment of Jewish literature.

Table of Contents:

Foreword Jonathan Wilson  Introduction  1. Introduction: Jewish Literature(s) in English? Axel Stähler  2. On Being a Jewish Critic Bryan Cheyette  The Jewish Imaginary in Non-Jewish Anglophone Literature(s)  3. Postcolonial Cultures and the Jewish Imaginary Jamie S. Scott  4. "What’s More Important than a Gesture?" The Cultural Performativity of Jewishness Sigrun Meinig  Changing Centres, Changing Peripheries, and Spaces in-Between – Jewish Writing from the Anglophone Diaspora(s)  America  5. Literary Symptomology and Jewish Fiction: Envy; or, The New Yiddish in America  Emily Miller Budick  6. Jewish/Queer: Thresholds of Vulnerable Identities in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America  Ranen Omer-Sherman  7. Fifty Ways to See your Lover: Vision and Revision in the Fiction of Amy Bloom David Brauner  Britain  8. Otherness and Affiliation in Anglo--Jewish Poetry Peter Lawson  9. Diasporic Voices? Second-Generation Jewish Authors in Britain Oliver Groß  ‘Postcolonia’  10. Postcolonialism and the Irish Jewish Experience: The Novels of David Marcus and Ronit Lentin Catherine Hezser  11. Jewish Writers and Postcolonial Choices in South Africa Margaret Lenta  12. Jewish Literature in Australia Elisa Morera de la Vall  13. Contemporary Jewish Plays on the Canadian Stage Albert-Reiner Glaap  14. The Anglo--Israeli Writer: Double Identities in Troubled Times Karen Alkalay-Gut  The ‘Loquation’ of Jewish Culture  15. Voices of Identity: Language in Jewish--American Literature Pascal Fischer  16. The Words to Say It: The Loss of Language and Power in Cynthia Ozick’s ‘Envy; or Yiddish in America’ Miriam Sivan  17. Ricki Lake in Tel-Aviv: The Alternative of Orly Castel-Bloom’s Hebrew--English Karen Grumberg. Anglophone Jewish Writers