Middlebrow literature and the making of German-Jewish identity
By: Jonathan M. Hess
Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture; Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Stanford, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 259
ISBN-13: 9780804761222
Description: "For generations of German-speaking Jews, the works of Goethe and Schiller epitomized the world of European high culture, a realm that Jews actively participated in as both readers and consumers. Yet from the 1830s on, Jews writing in German also produced a vast corpus of popular fiction that was explicitly Jewish in content, audience, and function. Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity offers the first comprehensive investigation in English of this literature, which sought to navigate between tradition and modernity, between Jewish history and the German present, and between the fading walls of the ghetto and the promise of a new identity as members of a German bourgeoisie." "This study examines the ways in which popular fiction assumed an unprecedented role in shaping Jewish identity during this period. It locates in nineteenth-century Germany a defining moment of the modern Jewish experience and the beginnings of a tradition of Jewish belles lettres that is in many ways still with us today."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 209-249) and index.
Table of contents: title: When rabbis became novelists : the emergence of Jewish literature in nineteenth-century Germany; title: Under the sword of the Spanish inquisition : the Sephardic legacy and the making of middlebrow classics; title: Leopold Kompert and the pleasures of nostalgia : ghetto fiction and the creation of a usable past; title: Middlebrow culture in pursuit of romance : love, fiction and the virtues of marrying in; title: Middlebrow fiction and the making of modern orthodoxy.