Post-War Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self Explanation and Transatlantic Connections

by D. Brauner

Overview

In this groundbreaking study, David Brauner explores the representation of Jewishness in a number of works by postwar British and American Jewish writers, identifying a transatlantic sensibility characterised by an insistent compulsion to explain themselves and their Jewishness in ambivalent terms. Through detailed readings of novels by famous American authors such as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud and Arthur Miller, alongside those by lesser-known British writers such as Frederic Raphael, Jonathan Wilson, Howard Jacobson and Clive Sinclair, certain common preoccupations emerge: Gentiles who mistake themselves for Jews; Jewish hostility towards Nature; writing (and not writing) about the Holocaust, and the relationship between fact and fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349409693
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	01/01/2001
Edition description:	1st ed. 2001
Pages:	222
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

DAVID BRAUNER is Lecturer in English and American Studies at the University of Reading, Berkshire. He has published articles on Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Jane Smiley and a number of other contemporary fiction writers.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Preface Explaining Themselves: Ambivalent Representations of Jewishness in Postwar British and American Fiction The Gentile who Mistook Himself for a Jew Nature Anxiety, Homosocial Desire and (Sub)urban Paranoia: The Jewish Anti-Pastoral Breaking the Silence: Jewish Women Writing the War and the War After Philip Roth and Clive Sinclair: Portrait of the Artist as a Jew(ish Other) Notes Index

Editorial Reviews

'This is a valuable comparative study...' - Religious Studies Review

'Highly recommended...' - Choice

From the Publisher