Evolutions of Jewish Character in British Fiction
Subtitle: Nor Yet Redeemed
Edition: First edition.
Series: Routledge Studies in Romanticism
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2018
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 192
ISBN-13: 9780429507571
Subjects: English fiction; History and criticism; Jews in literature; Roman anglais; Histoire et critique; Juifs dans la littérature
Description: "Evolutions of Jewish Character in British Fiction: Nor Yet Redeemed builds upon recent scholarship concerning representations of Jews in the British Romantic and Victorian periods. Existing studies identify common trends, or link positive Jewish portrayals to authorial interests and social movements; this volume argues that understanding developments in Jewish portrayals can be enhanced by looking at the way antecedent Jewish characters and tropes are negotiated within developing literary movements. Evolutions of Jewish Character in British Fiction examines how the contradictory nature of Jewish stereotypes, combined with the Jews' complicated entanglement of religion, race, and nationality, presented an opportunity for writers to think about the gap between representations and individuals. The tension between stereotyping and realist impulses lead to a diversity of Jewish types, but also to an increasingly muddled sense of Jewish interests. This confusion over Jewish identity generated in turn a subgenre of texts that sought to educate readers about Jews by interrogating stereotypes and thinking about the Jews' relationships to host cultures. In a literary landscape increasingly defined by individuality and realism, outcast and secretive Jews provided subjects ready-made to reveal the inadequacies of surfaces for understanding the interior self. The replacement of simplistic Jewish stereotypes with morally complex Jewish characters is an effect both of realism's valuation of interiority and of the historical movement toward expanding the definitions of British identity.??"--Provided by publisher.
Table of contents: title: Chapter Introduction --; title: "What Is a Jew?": Stereotypes, Realism, and the Construction of Character  -- Aaron S. Kaiserman; title: chapter 1 Shylock's Metamorphoses and the Jew Bill Controversy  -- Aaron S. Kaiserman; title: chapter 2 The Political Valences of Jews in the Revolutionary Decade  -- Aaron S. Kaiserman; title: chapter 3 Radical Selfhood --; title: The Jew as Anti-Hero  -- Aaron S. Kaiserman; title: chapter 4 Historicizing Jewish National Character  -- Aaron S. Kaiserman; title: chapter 5 Anglo-Jews, or Jews in England?  -- Aaron S. Kaiserman; title: chapter Conclusion --; title: The Shifting Ground of Jewish Representation -- Aaron S. Kaiserman.