Singing in a foreign land : Anglo-Jewish poetry, 1812-1847 / Karen A. Weisman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Weisman, Karen A., author.

Series:

Jewish culture and contexts

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English poetry--19th century--History and criticism.

English poetry.

English poetry--Jewish authors--History and criticism.

Romanticism--Great Britain.

Romanticism.

Judaism and literature.

History.

English poetry--Jewish authors.

Great Britain.

Judaism and literature--England--History--19th century.

England.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History.

Physical Description:

250 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018]

Summary:

Karen A. Weisman examines the uneasy literary inheritance of British cultural and poetic norms by early nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish authors. Focusing on a range of subgenres, from elegies to pastorals to psalm translations, Weisman shows how the writers she studies engaged with the symbolic resources of English poetry-such as the land of England itself-from which they had been historically alienated. Weisman looks at the self-conscious explorations of lyric form by Emma Lyon; the elegies for members of the British royal family penned by Hyman Hurwitz; the ironic reflections on hybrid identities written by sisters Celia and Marion Moss; and the poems of Grace Aguilar that explicitly join lyric effusion to Jewish historical concerns. These poets were well-versed in both Jewish texts and mainstream literary history, and Weisman argues that they model an extreme example of Romantic self-reflexivity: they implicitly lament their own inability fully to appropriate inherited Romantic ideals about nature and transcendence even while acknowledging that those ideals are already deeply ironized by such figures as Coleridge, Shelley, and Wordsworth. And because they do not possess a secure history binding them to the landscape of British hearth and home, they recognize the need to create in their lyric poetry a stable narrative of identity within England and within the King's English even as they gesture toward the impossibility-and sometimes even the undesirability-of doing so. Singing in a Foreign Land reveals how these Anglo-Jewish poets, caught between their desire to enter the English lyric tradition and their inability as Jews to share in the full religious and cultural Romantic heritage, asserted a subtle cultural authority in their poems that recognized an alienation from their own expressive resources.

Contents:

Chapter 1. Emma Lyon's spacious firmament

Chapter 2. Mourning, translation, pastoral : Hyman Hurwitz

Chapter 3. The early efforts of Celia and Marion Moss

Chapter 4. Grace Aguilar and the demands of lyric

Coda. Amy Levy's impossible modernity.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780812250343

0812250346

OCLC:

1029074730