The rise and fall of Jewish American literature : ethnic studies and the challenge of identity / Benjamin Schreier.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schreier, Benjamin, author.

Series:

Jewish culture and contexts

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--Jewish authors--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--Jewish authors.

Jewish literature--United States--History and criticism.

Jewish literature.

Jews--Identity.

Jews.

United States.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

228 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020]

Summary:

"The dominant event of Jewish American literary history is "emergence" or "breakthrough"-the irruption in the 1950s of Jewish American writers like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley into the heart of the American cultural scene. ... Breakthrough needs to be approached primarily as an event in Jewish American historiography, not Jewish American history. The innovation of breakthrough was not simply to link, inevitably and unimpeachably, the Jewish authors and Jewish texts of Jewish American literature but to reorient thinking about literary texts written by Jews in America around authors as representatives of Jewish American people, experience, and culture; Jewish American literary study would professionalize over the following decades as scholarly focus shifted from the object of literary representation to its subject, from Jews as a community written about to Jews as a population writing" -- Provided by publisher.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780812252576

0812252578

OCLC:

1141021762