Jewish Feeling: Difference and Affect in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Women's Writing

by Richa Dwor

Overview

Jewish Feeling brings together affect theory and Jewish Studies to trace Jewish difference in literary works by nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish authors. Dwor argues that midrash, a classical rabbinic interpretive form, is a site of Jewish feeling and that literary works underpinned by midrashic concepts engage affect in a distinctly Jewish way. The book thus emphasises the theological function of literature and also the new opportunities afforded by nineteenth-century literary forms for Jewish women's theological expression.

For authors such as Grace Aguilar (1816-1847) and Amy Levy (1861-1889), feeling is a complex and overlapping category that facilitates the transmission of Jewish ways of thinking into English literary forms. Dwor reads them alongside George Eliot, herself deeply engaged with issues of contemporary Jewish identity. This sheds new light on Eliot by positioning her works in a nexus of Jewish forms and concerns. Ultimately, and despite considerable differences in style and outlook, Aguilar and Levy are shown to deploy Jewish feeling in their ethics of futurity, resistance to conversion and closure, and in their foregrounding of a model of reading with feeling.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781472589804
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	10/22/2015
Series:	New Directions in Religion and Literature
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	609 KB

About the Author

'Richa Dwor is an Instructor in the English Department at Douglas College, Canada.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Affect and Jewish Feeling
What is affect?
What is midrash?
Midrash and affect

Chapter 1 – 'The still undercurrent of deep feeling': history and nation for Grace Aguilar
'More than unusually moved': representing women's reading
'The full gushing tide of rapture': theorising women's reading
'The Bible, and that nation whose earliest history it so vividly records' Jewish histories for England's Jews

Chapter 2 – 'Finer and finer discrimination': George Eliot's feeling for the Jews
'Various combinations of common likeness': fellow feeling and the ethics of form
'Absorbing enthusiasm': education and identity
'A people with oriental sunlight in their blood': Jewish nationalism

Chapter 3 – 'A fragment of the eternal truth': futurity and race for Amy Levy
'That elaborate misconception': debating Deronda with George Eliot and Henry James
'Startling with excess of truth': futurity and poetic unfitness
'A strange yearning affection': the racial romance of Reuben Sachs

Conclusion – Esther and Judith in London

Index

Editorial Reviews

Although studies of Jews in British literature and culture are plentiful, studies devoted to early Anglo-Jewish authors are extremely rare. ... Dwor does a considerable service in adding to the current scholarship on Aguilar and Levy, who have both enjoyed something of a renaissance in the past two decades. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the history of Anglo-Jewish literature and culture, Jewish women writers, and Victorian
fiction and religion more generally.
Religion and the Arts

Richa Dwor's Jewish Feeling is an important contribution to studies of 19th-century Anglo-Jewish women as writers and of Jews as subjects in their work. ... Dwor's compelling thesis is that 19th-century Jewish women writers, specifically in fiction and poetry, developed a midrashic technique of persuading through affect - developing and appealing to affectus - as they evoked Jewish difference and elaborated visions for the future of Jews in Britain. ... Jewish Feeling grapples well with its potentially slippery topic. Dwor draws amply on recent criticism and theory, placing her study within the important and growing fields of Anglo-Jewish literary and cultural criticism. This book makes significant contributions to both.
Literature and History

Richa Dwor's illuminating study ... deftly combines philosophy, theology and literature to demonstrate a new category of affect - both Midrashic and secular - manifest in the realm of nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish female writing.
Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher