Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature

by Davison, Carol Margaret

• ISBN13: 9780333929513
• ISBN10: 0333929519
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-09-18
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature examines the Gothic's engagement with the Jewish Question and British national identity over the course of a century. Beginning with an exploration of Jewish demonology from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, Davison interprets the changing significance of the transnational Wandering Jew in classic Gothic fiction who later migrates into Victorian realism. What emerges is the elucidation of an anti-Semitic "spectropoetics" that conveys how the specters of Jewish difference and Jewish assimilation haunt British literature.

Author Biography

Carol Margaret Davison is Acting Director of Women's Studies and Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Windsor, Canada. She has authored numerous articles on women's writing, Gothic, Victorian, postcolonial and African-American literature, and is the editor of the award-winning study, Bram Stoker's Dracula: Sucking Through the Century, 1897-1997. She is currently working on a monograph on the Scottish Gothic literary tradition.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements	viii
Introduction: The Nation and the Spectral Wandering Jew	1	(14)
The Contested Enlightenment, the Contested Castle	15	(19)
The Primal Scene: The Skeleton in Britain's Closet	34	(21)
Cabalistic Conspiracies and the Crypto-Jew	55	(32)
The Rise of the Vampiric Wandering Jew: A Sinister German--English Co-Production	87	(33)
Britain, Vampire Empire: Fin-de-Siecle Fears and Bram Stoker's Dracula	120	(38)
Afterword: Pathological Projection and the Nazi Nightmare	158	(8)
Notes	166	(34)
Works Cited	200	(18)
Index	218