Kabbalah and Literature (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781501379611)

Focuses on a range of Jewish and non-Jewish writers to examine the intersection of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, and secular Jewish literatures.

Kabbalah and Literature shows how the Jewish mystical tradition contributes to the renewal of literature in a modern, global, and increasingly disconnected age. Kitty Millet explores Kabbalah's conceptual underpinnings, aesthetic principles, tenets, and signifiers to demonstrate how literature's absorption of kabbalistic material has altered its ontology, function, and the tasks it sets for itself.

Reading writers from Europe and the Americas, Kitty Millet maps how the kabbalist's desire to "recover Eden" transforms into a latent messianic drive only intuitable through text. Thus it charts a journey of sorts, a migration of Jewish mystical material embedded surreptitiously within text in order to shift ever so slightly at times the range of the literary to encompass an aesthetic vision not easily reducible to the literal, the known, the allegorical, or even the philosophical.

In this way, Kabbalah and Literature proposes a novel, intuitive approach, shifting focus away from the Jewish text's epistemological elements to embrace its "secrets."

Author: Kitty Millet
ISBN-10: 1501379615
ISBN-13: 9781501379611
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Language: English
Published: 08/21/2025
Pages: 272
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.00d