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For more than two hundred years, Jews have played important roles in the development of American literature. The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature addresses a wide array of themes and approaches to the distinct yet multifaceted body of Jewish American literature. Essays examine writing from the 1700s to major contemporary writers such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Topics covered include literary history, immigration and acculturation, Yiddish and Hebrew literature, popular culture, women writers, literary theory and poetics, multilingualism, the Holocaust, and contemporary fiction. This collection of specially commissioned essays by leading figures discusses Jewish American literature in relation to ethnicity, religion, politics, race, gender, ideology, history, and ethics, and places it in the contexts of both Jewish and American writing. With its chronology and guides to further reading, this volume will prove valuable to scholars and students alike.
List of contents
Introduction Hana Wirth-Nesher and Michael P. Kramer; 1. Beginnings and ends: the origins of Jewish American literary history Michael P. Kramer; 2. Imagining Judaism in America Susannah Heschel; 3. The East European immigrants Priscilla Wald; 4. Coney Island, USA: America in the Yiddish literary imagination David G. Roskies; 5. Hebrew literature in America Alan Mintz; 6. Multilingual Jewish American writing Hana Wirth-Nesher; 7. Jewish American popular culture Donald Weber; 8. Jewish American poetry Maeera Shreiber; 9. Jewish American writers on the left Alan Wald; 10. Jewish American Renaissance Ruth R. Wisse; 11. The Holocaust and the Jewish American imagination Emily Miller Budick; 12. Jewish American women writers and the race question Susan Gubar; 13. Contemporary literary theory and Jewish American poetics Shira Wolosky; 14. Identity matters: contemporary Jewish American writing Tresa Grauer.
About the author
Michael P. Kramer is Professor in the Department of English at Bar Ilan University. He has written widely on Jewish American literature and he is the editor of New Essays on Seize the Day (1998).Hana Wirth-Nesher is Samuel L. and Perry Haber Chair on the Study of the Jewish Experience and Professor of English, Tel Aviv University. She is the author of City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel.
Summary
This book addresses a wide array of themes and approaches to the distinct yet multifaceted body of Jewish American literature. Essays cover writing from the 1700s to major contemporary writers such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Topics covered include immigration and acculturation, Yiddish and Hebrew literature, and the Holocaust.
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'... some exceptional essays in the collection ...'. The Times Literary Supplement
