Modernism, feminism, and Jewishness / Maren Tova Linett.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Linett, Maren Tova.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Women authors.

English literature.

Modernism (Literature)--Women authors.

Modernism (Literature).

Modernism (Literature)--Themes, motives.

Jews in literature.

Jews--Identity.

Jews.

Feminism--Religious aspects--Judaism.

Feminism.

Themes, motives.

Women authors.

Physical Description:

xi, 229 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, [2007]

Summary:

Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness explores the aesthetic and political roles performed by Jewish characters in women's fiction between the World Wars. Focusing mainly on British modernism, it argues that female authors enlist a multifaceted vision of Jewishness to help them shape fictions that are thematically daring and formally experimental. Maren Linett analyzes the meanings and motifs that Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Dorothy Richardson, and Djuna Barnes associate with Jewishness. The writers' simultaneous identification with and distancing from Jews produced complex portrayals in which Jews serve at times as models for the authors' art, and at times as foils against which their writing is defined. By examining the political and literary power of semitic discourse for these key women authors, Linett fills a significant gap in the account of the cultural and literary forces that shaped modernism.

Contents:

Introduction: imagined Jews and the shape of feminist modernism 1

1 "Strip each statement of its money motive": Jews and the ideal of disinterested art in Warner, Rhys, and Woolf 32

2 Transformations of supersessionism in Woolf and Richardson 60

3 Adding bathrooms, fomenting revolutions: modernity and Jewishness in Woolf and Warner 80

4 The race must go on: gender, Jewishness, and racial continuity in Barnes and Richardson 111

5 The "No time region": time, trauma, and Jewishness in Barnes and Rhys 140

6 Metatextual Jewishness: shaping feminist modernism 173.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 216-226) and index.

ISBN:

9780521880978

0521880971

OCLC:

154682308