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20C - Antisemitism in Modern Literature and Theater

English Literature

from Part III - The Modern Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2022

By
Bryan Cheyette
Edited by
Steven Katz
Steven Katz
Affiliation:
Boston University
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Summary

The founding fathers of English literature, Chaucer and Shakespeare, bequeathed a range of possible attitudes to Jews and Judaism. These can be found in the ambivalent figure of “the Jew” – malign and benign, medieval and modern – in much 19th- and 20th-century English literature, from the romantic poets to imperial writers, and from realist novelists to modernist writers of all kinds. The essay contextualizes these changing attitudes and ends with Graham Greene, George Orwell, and Margaret Drabble.

Keywords

Anthony TrollopeGeorge EliotT. S. EliotGeorge OrwellMargaret Drabble
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Antisemitism , pp. 377 - 391
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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References

Further Reading

Cheyette, B., Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge, 1993). A still influential analysis of antisemitism in liberal culture with reference to a wide range of English literature from the late 19th century to the 1940s.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Felsenstein, F., Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660–1830 (Baltimore, MD, 1995). This heavily researched book provides a contextual overview of English Jew-hatred from the restoration to the romantic period.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freedman, J., The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (New York, 2000). An original and creative account of transatlantic literary antisemitism in the long 20th century.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaufman, H., English Origins, Jewish Discourse and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (University Park, PA, 2009). This study explores the conflict between religious and racial definitions of “the Jew” in relation to 19th-century English literature.Google Scholar
Linett, M. T., Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness (Cambridge, 2007). The first book-length study to bring together modernism and feminism in relation to British literary antisemitism.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Page, J. W., Imperfect Sympathies: Jews and Judaism in British Romantic Literature and Culture (New York, 2004). This is the standard work on British romanticism and antisemitism.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ragussis, M., Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham, NC, 1995). This book investigates the way in which conversionist antisemitism was resisted in 19th-century English literature.Google Scholar
Reizbaum, M., James Joyce’s Judaic Other (Stanford, CA, 1999). A thorough study of how Joyce used Jews and Judaism to create Ulysses which is the most sophisticated account of the subject.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scrivener, M., Jewish Representations in British Literature, 1780–1840: After Shylock (New York, 2011). A wide-ranging and thoroughly researched account of Jews and Judaism in British culture in the long 18th century.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shapiro, J., Shakespeare and the Jews (New York, 1996). The standard work on the perception of Jews and Judaism in the early modern period which extends to the mid-18th century.Google Scholar
Trubowitz, L., Civil Antisemitism, Modernism and British Culture, 1902–1939 (New York, 2012). A thoughtful study of how antisemitism functions in civil society with reference to anti-immigration legislation, conspiracy theories and a wide range of modern fiction.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Valman, N., The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (Cambridge, 2007). The first and only book to locate “the Jewess” at the heart of perceptions of Jews and Judaism in the long 19th century.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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