The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780521863063)

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.

Author: Nadia Valman
ISBN-10: 0521863066
ISBN-13: 9780521863063
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 05/07/2007
Pages: 292
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.32lbs
Size: 9.03h x 6.40w x 0.92d