Kirjahaku

For three hundred years the ghetto defined Jewish culture in the late medieval and early modern period in Western Europe. In the nineteenth-century it was a free-floating concept which travelled to Eastern Europe and the United States. Eastern European “ghettos”, which enabled genocide, were crudely rehabilitated by the Nazis during World War Two as if they were part of a benign medieval tradition. In the United States, the word ghetto was routinely applied to endemic black ghettoization which has lasted from 1920 until the present. Outside of America “the ghetto” has been universalized as the incarnation of class difference, or colonialism, or apartheid, and has been applied to segregated cities and countries throughout the world. In this Very Short Introduction Bryan Cheyette unpicks the extraordinarily complex layers of contrasting meanings that have accrued over five hundred years to ghettos, considering their different settings across the globe. He considers core questions of why and when urban, racial, and colonial ghettos have appeared, and who they contain. Exploring their various identities, he shows how different ghettos interrelate, or are contrasted, across time and space, or even in the same place. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

In this fascinating and erudite book, Bryan Cheyette throws new light on a wide range of modern and contemporary writers—some at the heart of the canon, others more marginal—to explore the power and limitations of the diasporic imagination after the Second World War. Moving from early responses to the death camps and decolonization, through internationally prominent literature after the Second World War, the book culminates in fresh engagements with contemporary Jewish, post-ethnic, and postcolonial writers. Cheyette regards many of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century luminaries he examines—among them Hannah Arendt, Anita Desai, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Primo Levi, Caryl Phillips, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Edward Said, Zadie Smith, and Muriel Spark—as critical exemplars of the diasporic imagination. Against the discrete disciplinary thinking of the academy, he elaborates and argues for a new comparative approach across Jewish and postcolonial histories and literatures. And in so doing, Cheyette illuminates the ways in which histories and cultures can be imagined across national and communal boundaries.

Bryan Cheyette combines cultural theory, discourse analysis, and new historicism with close readings of work by Arnold, Trollope and George Eliot, Buchan and Kipling, Shaw and Wells, Belloc and Chesterton, T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, to argue that ‘the Jew’ lies at the heart of modern English society: not as a stereotype, but as the embodiment of confusion and indeterminacy.

Muriel Spark is widely considered to be one of the most gifted and innovative British novelists of her generation. Professor Cheyette's study is the first to explore her twenty novels as a whole and includes discussion of her short stories, poems and literary criticism.

This collection of essays examines various representations of "the Jew" in British and American literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It analyzes in detail the literary racism and antisemitism of some of the most important and influential writers of this period, including Dickens, Trollope, James, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Woolf, and Orwell, as well as such marginal figures as Dorothy Richardson, Stevie Smith, and Michael Gold. The contributors are all well-known Anglo-American literary, cultural, or feminist critics; some have written extensively on literary racism or antisemitism, others are working in this area for the first time. The collection does not impose a schema or new orthodoxy, but instead encourages a plurality of approaches to a difficult and always contentious issue that has been demarcated into broadly defined "politically correct" and "liberal humanist" positions. Liberal humanism asserts that the ameliorating western canon has, by definition, nothing to do with racism or antisemitism. Political correctness wishes to exclude from the academy any literary text deemed to reinforce oppressive stereotypes. This volume adopts neither position, arguing instead that these two supposedly antagonistic approaches are, in fact, mirror-images of each other.