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Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature examines the charged but mostly overlooked presence of the sensational Jew in Antebellum literature. It demonstrates how the "Sensational Jew" is a revealing figure in antebellum culture, as well as an important antecedent to contemporary Antisemitism in the US.
List of contents
- Introduction: Money Laundering and the Sensational Jew
- 1: Region, Capitalism, and the Jew in the Post-Tom Plantation Novel
- 2: La Belle Juive, or "Jew"?: From Rachel Félix to The Marble Faun
- 3: Desire by Proxy: The Cosmopolitan Jew in Theodore Winthrop's Cecil Dreeme
- 4: Fagin in America
- Conclusion: Race, Money, and the Jew
- Coda: Charlottesville, "Molineux," and the Phantom Jew
About the author
David Anthony is Professor and Director of the School of Literature, Writing, and Digital Humanities at SIU Carbondale. He received his PhD at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Paper Money Men: Commerce, Manhood, and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum America, and various articles on antebellum literature in venues such as ALH, American Literature, Early American Literature, The Yale Journal of Criticism and elsewhere. Anthony has also published a novel, entitled Something for Nothing.
Summary
Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature examines the charged but mostly overlooked presence of the sensational Jew in Antebellum literature. It demonstrates how the "Sensational Jew" is a revealing figure in antebellum culture, as well as an important antecedent to contemporary Antisemitism in the US.
Additional text
In his excellent Sensationalism and the Jew, Anthony (Southern Illinois Univ.) traces antebellum anxiety about rapidly morphing socioeconomic conditions during roughly the 1830s and 1840s...Anthony displays a remarkable grasp of antebellum sensationalism, both the low- and high-brow versions, that marked class by mimicking the standing racial fantasies of telling who people were by using pseudoscience, especially physiognomy.
