Anglophone Jewish Literature
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Book 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
Contents
Contributors
Introduction
Axel Stähler (University of Bonn)
Jewish Literature(s) in English?
Bryan Cheyette (University of Southampton)
On Being a Jewish Critic
The Jewish Imaginary in Non-Jewish Anglophone Literature(s)
Jamie S. Scott (York University, Toronto)
Postcolonial Cultures and the Jewish Imaginary
Sigrun Meinig (University of Bielefeld)
"What’s more important than a gesture?" The Cultural Performativity of Jewishness
Changing Centres, Changing Peripheries, and Spaces In-Between –
Jewish Writing from the Anglophone Diaspora(s)
– America –
Ranen Omer-Sherman (University of Miami)
Jewish/Queer: Thresholds of Vulnerable Identities in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America
Emily Miller Budick (The Hebrew University in Jerusalem)
Literary Symptomology and Jewish Fiction: "Envy; or, The New Yiddish in America"
David Brauner (University of Reading)
Fifty Ways to See Your Lover: Vision and Revision in the Fiction of Amy Bloom
– Britain –
Peter Lawson (University of Southampton)
Otherness and Affiliation in Anglo-Jewish Poetry
Oliver Groß (University of Bamberg)
Diasporic Voices? Second-Generation Jewish Authors in Britain
Claudia Sternberg (University of Leeds)
Diaspora Blues: Language, Literature and the Body in the Work of Clive Sinclair
– ‘Postcolonia’ –
Catherine Hezser (Trinity College Dublin)
Postcolonialism and the Irish Jewish Experience
Albert-Reiner Glaap (University of Düsseldorf)
Contemporary Jewish Plays on the Canadian Stage
Margaret Lenta (University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban)
Jewish Writers and Postcolonial Choices in South Africa
Elisa Morera de la Vall (University of Barcelona)
Jewish Writing in Australia
Karen Alkalay-Gut (Tel Aviv University)
The Anglo-Israeli Writer: Double Identities in Troubled Times
The ‘Loquation’ of Jewish Culture
Pascal Fischer (University of Würzburg)
Voices of Identity: Language in Jewish-American Literature
Miriam Sivan (University of Haifa)
The Words to Say It: The Loss of Language and Power in Cynthia Ozick’s "Envy; or Yiddish in America"
Karen Grumberg (University of Texas, Austin)
Ricki Lake in Tel-Aviv: Orly Castel-Bloom’s Hebrew English
Chronology of Anglophone Jewish Communities
Anglophone Jewish Authors
Bibliography
Index
Editor(s)
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.