The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture

by Nadia Valman

• ISBN13: 9780521863063
• ISBN10: 0521863066
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-05-07
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Stories about Jewesses proliferated in nineteenth-century Britain as debates about the place of the Jews in the nation raged. While previous scholarship has explored the prevalence of antisemitic stereotypes in this period, Nadia Valman argues that the figure of the Jewess - virtuous, appealing and sacrificial - reveals how hostility towards Jews was accompanied by pity, identification and desire. Reading a range of texts from popular romance to the realist novel, she investigates how the complex figure of the Jewess brought the instabilities of nineteenth-century religious, racial and national identity into uniquely sharp focus. Tracing the narrative of the Jewess from its beginnings in Romantic and Evangelical literature, and reading canonical writers including Walter Scott, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope alongside more minor figures such as Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Grace Aguilar and Amy Levy, Valman demonstrates the remarkable persistence of this narrative and its myriad transformations across the century.

Table of Contents

Introduction: the Jewess question

Repellent beauty: the liberal nation and the Jewess

Jewish persuasions: gender and the culture of conversion

Women of Israel: femininity, politics and Anglo-Jewish fiction

Hellenist heroines: commerce, art and the Jewess

The shadow of the harem: fin de siÿcle racial romance

Conclusion: neither wild thing nor tame

Bibliography

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.