Description
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.
An analysis of the cultural meanings of Jewishness in the work of Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and others.
About the Author
Maren Linett teaches at Purdue University, where she specializes in modern British fiction in the broader context of Anglo-American modernism. She has published articles in The Journal of Modern Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, and Twentieth-Century Literature, and has edited a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies entitled 'Modernism's Jews/Jewish Modernisms'.
Reviews
'... Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness will have a significant impact on literary and cultural studies. Its innovative readings of the novels, impressive archival work, and often breathtaking connections are sure to attract a broad academic readership and to contribute to the rapidly expanding field of Jewish literary studies.' Allosemitic Modernism
'[Linett] has looked with a clear, analytic, and unjaundiced eye at the works of these major figures of the Modernist movement. Her analyses cannot be ignored by readers who engage the ethics and values of any of these five feminist authors, the development of feminist thinking between the wars, or literary modernism.' Project Muse
Book Information
ISBN 9780521880978
Author Maren Tova Linett
Format Hardback
Page Count 242
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 530g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 17mm
An analysis of the cultural meanings of Jewishness in the work of Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and others.
About the Author
Maren Linett teaches at Purdue University, where she specializes in modern British fiction in the broader context of Anglo-American modernism. She has published articles in The Journal of Modern Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, and Twentieth-Century Literature, and has edited a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies entitled 'Modernism's Jews/Jewish Modernisms'.
Reviews
'... Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness will have a significant impact on literary and cultural studies. Its innovative readings of the novels, impressive archival work, and often breathtaking connections are sure to attract a broad academic readership and to contribute to the rapidly expanding field of Jewish literary studies.' Allosemitic Modernism
'[Linett] has looked with a clear, analytic, and unjaundiced eye at the works of these major figures of the Modernist movement. Her analyses cannot be ignored by readers who engage the ethics and values of any of these five feminist authors, the development of feminist thinking between the wars, or literary modernism.' Project Muse
Book Information
ISBN 9780521880978
Author Maren Tova Linett
Format Hardback
Page Count 242
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 530g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 17mm
