The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua

Once referred to by the New York Times as the "Israeli Faulkner," A. B. Yehoshua's fiction invites an assessment of Israel's Jewish inheritance and the moral and political options that the country currently faces in the Middle East. The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua is an insightful overview of the fiction, nonfiction, and hundreds of critical responses to the work of Israel's leading novelist.
Instead of an exhaustive chronological-biographical account of Yehoshua's artistic growth, Yael Halevi-Wise calls for a systematic appreciation of the author's major themes and compositional patterns. Specifically, she argues for reading Yehoshua's novels as reflections on the "condition of Israel," constructed multifocally to engage four intersecting levels of signification: psychological, sociological, historical, and historiosophic. Each of the book's seven chapters employs a different interpretive method to showcase how Yehoshua's constructions of character psychology, social relations, national history, and historiosophic allusions to traditional Jewish symbols manifest themselves across his novels. The book ends with a playful dialogue in the style of Yehoshua's masterpiece, Mr. Mani, that interrogates his definition of Jewish identity.
Masterfully written, with full control of all the relevant materials, Halevi-Wise's assessment of Yehoshua will appeal to students and scholars of modern Jewish literature and Jewish studies.

About the author

Yael Halevi-Wise is Associate Professor and Chair of Jewish Studies at McGill University. She is the author of Interactive Fictions: Scenes of Storytelling in the Novel and the editor of Sephardism: Spanish Jewish History and the Modern Literary Imagination.

Summary

Explores the layers of signification that A. B. Yehoshua constructs in his fiction to draw readers into a critical analysis of the condition of Israel as well as his representations of place, vocational identities, names, holidays, and love.

Product details

• Authors: Yael Halevi-Wise, Yael (Associate Professor & Chair of Jewish Studies Halevi-Wise
• Publisher: University Presses
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 11.06.2024
• EAN: 9780271087863
• ISBN: 978-0-271-08786-3
• Dimensions: 152 mm x 229 mm x 16 mm
• Weight: 340 g
• Illustrations: Karten
• Series: Dimyonot
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Miscellaneous; FICTION / Literary, RELIGION / Judaism / General, PHILOSOPHY / Religious, LITERARY CRITICISM / Jewish, Judaism, Literature: history & criticism, Literature: history and criticism, Relating to Jewish people and groups, Islamic & Arabic philosophy, A. B. Yehoshua;Israeli literature;Modern Hebrew literature