Search citation statements
Paper Sections
Citation Types
Year Published
Publication Types
Relationship
Authors
Journals
Stories about Jewesses proliferated in nineteenth-century Britain as debates about the place of the Jews in the nation raged. While previous scholarship has explored the prevalence of antisemitic stereotypes in this period, Nadia Valman argues that the figure of the Jewess - virtuous, appealing and sacrificial - reveals how hostility towards Jews was accompanied by pity, identification and desire. Reading a range of texts from popular romance to the realist novel, she investigates how the complex figure of the Jewess brought the instabilities of nineteenth-century religious, racial and national identity into uniquely sharp focus. Tracing the narrative of the Jewess from its beginnings in Romantic and Evangelical literature, and reading canonical writers including Walter Scott, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope alongside more minor figures such as Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Grace Aguilar and Amy Levy, Valman demonstrates the remarkable persistence of this narrative and its myriad transformations across the century.
Stories about Jewesses proliferated in nineteenth-century Britain as debates about the place of the Jews in the nation raged. While previous scholarship has explored the prevalence of antisemitic stereotypes in this period, Nadia Valman argues that the figure of the Jewess - virtuous, appealing and sacrificial - reveals how hostility towards Jews was accompanied by pity, identification and desire. Reading a range of texts from popular romance to the realist novel, she investigates how the complex figure of the Jewess brought the instabilities of nineteenth-century religious, racial and national identity into uniquely sharp focus. Tracing the narrative of the Jewess from its beginnings in Romantic and Evangelical literature, and reading canonical writers including Walter Scott, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope alongside more minor figures such as Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Grace Aguilar and Amy Levy, Valman demonstrates the remarkable persistence of this narrative and its myriad transformations across the century.
Amy Levy was a fin-de-siècle poet, novelist, and essayist. While critically acclaimed within her lifetime, she was all but forgotten by literary scholars until the 1980s, when her work was reintroduced to scholars as part of a larger project to integrate the writings of women and other minority groups into the canon. Levy falls into a number of these minority categories: she was not only female but also Jewish, and expressed non-normative understandings of sexual desire. Virtually all critical work on Levy since her reappearance in the field has been deeply rooted in her experiences as an her concepts of minority identity. In this review article, I examine the ways in which recent critical works on Levy that refine and expand preceding identity criticism. I argue that articles and book chapters by Iveta Jusová, Cynthia Scheinberg, and Linda Hunt Beckman are setting the new standard for identity criticism by examining the complex intersections of identity categories, and by linking identity to new fields of inquiry.Webs of strange patterns we weave (each owns) From color and sound; and like unto these, Soul has its tones and its semitones, Mind has its major and minor keys.-Amy Levy,'In a Minor Key'
What accounts for the surprising fact that fictional Jews fill the pages of Victorian literature but actual Jews constituted only a sliver of England's population? This article introduces readers to recent scholarship that attempts to answer this question, charting the diverse ways in which Jews were portrayed in the Victorian cultural imaginary. Much of this scholarship pivots around one fundamental contention: that the most significant thing about representations of nineteenth‐century Jewishness is what they have to teach us about nineteenth‐century Englishness. Depicting Jews became a crucial method for Victorians to test some of their guiding assumptions and underlying anxieties about their nationality and its relationship to the categories of race, religion, culture, and territory—categories contested then as now. After a brief survey of Jewishness's rise in literary studies, I discuss current trends in research treating Jewishness and Englishness; such research is now occurring within the fields of both Victorian Studies and Jewish Studies, productively contesting the disciplinary and geographic borders of each. Particular attention is paid to the engagement of new scholarship with issues of gender, principally representations of and by Jewish women, and genre, including the novel's fraught relationship to liberalism. I then explore the way analyses of Victorian Jewishness are increasingly going global, looking to British imperial and cultural involvement in America, Europe, and the Middle East. These moves have in turn provoked a reassessment of both Orientalism and Englishness as a cultural identity. Above all, this article argues for the value recent scholarship offers by continuing to inform and challenge our understanding not only of Jewishness but the many facets of Victorian culture with which it intersected.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.