The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction

by David Brauner (Editor), Axel Stähler (Editor)

Overview

Provides critical overviews of the main writers and key themes of Anglophone Jewish fiction
This collection of essays represents a new departure for, and a potentially (re)defining moment in, literary Jewish Studies. It is the first volume to bring together essays covering a wide range of American, British, South African, Canadian and Australian Jewish fiction. Moreover, it complicates all these terms, emphasising the porousness between different national traditions and moving beyond traditional definitions of Jewishness. For the sake of structural clarity, the volume is divided into three parts – ‘American Jewish Fiction’, ‘British Jewish Fiction’ and ‘International and Transnational Anglophone Jewish Fiction’ – but many of the essays cross over these boundaries and speak to each other implicitly, as well as, on occasion, explicitly. Extending and redefining the canon of modern Jewish fiction, the volume juxtaposes major authors with more marginal figures, revising and recuperating individual reputations, rediscovering forgotten and discovering new work, and in the process remapping the whole terrain. This volume opens windows onto vistas that previously had been obscured and opens doors for the next generation of studies that could not proceed without a wide-ranging, visionary empiricism grounding their work. The Edinburgh Companion is a paradigm-changing event, and nothing in Jewish literary studies that follows can fail to pay close attention to it.
Key Features:
Highlights the rich diversity of the field and identifies its key themes, including immigration, the Diaspora, the Holocaust, Judaism, assimilation, antisemitism and Zionism
Analyses the main trends in Anglophone Jewish fiction and situates them in historical context
Discusses the place of Anglophone Jewish fiction in relation to critical debates concerning transatlanticism and transnationalism; ethnicity and identity politics; postcolonial studies, feminist studies and Jewish Studies.
With a preface by Mark Shechner, the volume contains 28 essays by contributors including Vicki Aarons (Trinity University, Texas), Debra Shostak (Wooster College, Ohio), Ira Nadel (University of British Columbia), Efraim Sicher (Ben-Gurion University, Phyllis Lassner (Northwestern University), Sue Vice (University of Sheffield), Lori Harrison-Kahan (Boston College), Ruth Gilbert (University of Winchester), Beate Neumeier (University of Cologne) andSandra Singer (University of Guelph).

David Brauner is Professor of Contemporary Literature at The University of Reading.
Axel Stähler is Reader in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent, Canterbury.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780748646159
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	06/07/2015
Series:	Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities
Pages:	456
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

David Brauner is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Reading. He is the author of two monographs - Post-War Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self-Explanation and Transatlantic Connections (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2001) and Philip Roth (Manchester UniversityPress, 2007) - and has also published widely on twentieth-century Jewish literature, contemporary American fiction and post-war novelizations of biblical narratives.

Dr Axel Stähler is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. He is the editor of Writing Fundamentalism, with Klaus Stierstorfer (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) and Anglophone Jewish Literature (Routledge, 2007).

Table of Contents

List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsPreface: Jews Have Legs, Mark Shechner

Introduction: Modern Jewish Fiction, David Brauner and Axel Stähler

I: American Jewish Fiction

1: Pioneering Women Writers and the Deghettoisation of Early American Jewish Fiction, Lori Harrison-Kahan2: Sensibilities of Estrangement: Delmore Schwartz, Isaac Rosenfeld and Saul Bellow, Catherine Morley3: The Making of American Jewish Identities in Postwar American Fiction, Victoria Aarons4: ‘Are you kidding me?’: Black Humour in the Work of Joseph Heller, Stanley Elkin, Wallace Markfield, and Bruce Jay Friedman, David Gooblar5: American Jewish Life Writing, Illness, and the Ethics of Innovation, Aimee Pozorski6: From Feminist to Housewife and Back Again: Orthodoxy and Modernity in American Jewish Women’s Writing, Rachel Harris7: Soviet Jews, Re-Imagined: Anglophone Emigré Jewish Writers from the USSR, Sasha Senderovich8: History on a Personal Note: Postwar American Jewish Short Stories, David Brauner 9: Disappointed Believers? The Jewish Question Mark in Eisner’s ‘A Contract with God’, Sarah Lightman10: The Holocaust in American Jewish Fiction, Jennifer Lemberg11: Representing the Holocaust in Third-Generation American Jewish Writers, Monica Osborne 12: Marginal Writers; or, Jews Who Aren’t, Debra Shostak

II: British Jewish Fiction

13: The Postwar ‘New Wave’ of British Jewish Writing, Efraim Sicher14: Jewish Emigré and Refugee Writers in Britain, David Herman15: Jewish Exile in Englishness: Eva Tucker and Natasha Solomons, Phyllis Lassner16: Jewish, Half-Jewish, Jew-ish: Negotiating Identities in Contemporary British Jewish Literature, Ruth Gilbert17: Life Writing and the East End, Devorah Baum18: ‘Almost too good to be true’: Israel in British Jewish Fiction, Pre-Lebanon, Axel Stähler19: The Writing on the Wall: Israel in British Jewish Fiction, Post-Lebanon, Axel Stähler20: British Jewish Holocaust Fiction, Sue Vice21: Reading Matters: ‘Marginal’ British Jewish Writers, Beate Neumeier

III: International and Transnational Anglophone Jewish Fiction

22: Jewish Writing in Canada, Ira Nadel23: South African Jewish Writers, Linda Weinhouse24: Repairing Cracked Heirlooms: South African Jewish Literary Memory of Lithuania and Latvia, Claudia B. Braude25: Australian Jewish Fiction: A Bibliographical Survey, Serge Liberman26: ‘Migrant’ Jewish Writers in the Anglophone Diaspora, Sandra Singer27: Jewish Novels of the Spanish Civil War, Emily Robins Sharpe28: Mooristan and Palimpstine: Jews, Moors, and Christians in Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie, Shaul Bassi;

List of ContributorsBibliography

What People are Saying About This

Professor Bryan Henry Cheyette

The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction is a prodigious, paradigm-shifting collection. Made up of leading scholars in the field, it both ranges widely across linguistic and national boundaries and also includes detailed accounts of American, British, South African, Canadian and Australian Jewish fiction. It will transform our understanding of Jewish literary studies.

Editorial Reviews

This most comprehensive volume is replete with fascinating material creating much food for thought. Sturdily bound, with a typeface not difficult on ageing eyes and an attractive jacket...is highly recommended for all reference collections.

Reference Reviews, volume 30, issue 4 - William Baker

This most comprehensive volume is replete with fascinating material creating much food for thought. Sturdily bound, with a typeface not difficult on ageing eyes and an attractive jacket...is highly recommended for all reference collections.
— William Baker, Northern Illinois University for Reference Reviews, volume 30, issue 4

From the Publisher

The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction is a prodigious, paradigm-shifting collection. Made up of leading scholars in the field, it both ranges widely across linguistic and national boundaries and also includes detailed accounts of American, British, South African, Canadian and Australian Jewish fiction. It will transform our understanding of Jewish literary studies.

Professor Bryan Henry Cheyette