The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Cultu) (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, #54)

by Nadia Valman

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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.
  • ISBN13 9780521134057
  • Publish Date 18 March 2010 (first published 1 January 2007)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country GB
  • Imprint Cambridge University Press
  • Format Paperback (US Trade)
  • Pages 292
  • Language English