Publisher 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.

Author Biography

Axel Stähler teaches English and American literature at the University of Bonn, Germany and is project coordinator of the international research project Fundamentalism and Literature at the University of Münster, Germany. He has published widely on the literature and culture of the Anglophone and German-speaking Jewish diasporas.

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

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