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Introduces readers to the new perspectives, approaches and interpretive possibilities in Jewish American literature that emerged in the twenty-first Century.
List of contents
Introduction: toward a New Jewish American literary studies Victoria Aarons; Part I. Concepts: 1. 'Jewish American' or 'American Jewish': the hybrid in literary studies Berel Lang; 2. A new diaspora: Jewish American writers from across the globe Victoria Aarons; 3. Wrestling with politics: Jewish American writing from left to right (and back again) Michael Staub; 4. Israel and America in Jewish American writing Eli Lederhendler; 5. Jewish American writing and race Dean Franco; 6. Gender and feminism in contemporary Jewish American writing Jessica Lang; Part II. Contexts: 7. Rethinking postwar Jewish American writers Timothy Parrish; 8. The insistence of psychoanalysis in contemporary Jewish American fiction Willis Salomon; 9. Reimagining the past, imagining the future: myth, history, and mystery in contemporary Jewish American fiction David Brauner; 10. Women's voices: the assimilated subject and the persistence of marginalisation Catherine Morley; 11. A guide for the heretic: charting the journey off the path of tradition Avinoam Patt; Part III. 'New' Forms and Histories: 12. Rethinking literary and ethical response to the Holocaust: reading 'with Hitler in New York' Gary Weissman; 13. Jews in contemporary cinema and television Nathan Abrams; 14. Story into memoir, memoir into story: Iranian-Jewish-American writing Judie Newman; 15. Jewish-Latin American literature Darrell B. Lockhart; 16. Jewish American literary studies abroad Gustavo Sánchez Canales.
About the author
Victoria Aarons is author of A Measure of Memory (1996) and What Happened to Abraham (2005), both recipients of the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Book, and co-author with Alan L. Berger of Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory (2017). She is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow (Cambridge, 2017) and Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction (2016), and the co-editor of The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction (2015), Bernard Malamud: A Centennial Tribute (2016), and the forthcoming volume New Directions in Jewish American and Holocaust Literature: Reading and Teaching. Aarons is a judge of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, a prize awarded each year to a rising American Jewish writer of fiction. She has published well over seventy scholarly articles and is on the editorial board of Philip Roth Studies, Studies in American Jewish Literature, and Women in Judaism.
Summary
This volume is designed for undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars and teachers of Jewish American literature. It will be of interest to the educated lay audience given the timely nature of some of the issues addressed: race, gender, cultural and ethnic hybridity, and the relation of Israel and America.