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Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness

Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness

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Maren Tova Linett
Cambridge University Press, 10/18/2007
EAN 9780521880978, ISBN10: 0521880971

Hardcover, 242 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm
Language: English

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.

Introduction
Imagined Jews and the shape of feminist modernism
1. 'Strip each statement of its money motive'
Jews and the ideal of disinterested art in Warner, Rhys, and Woolf
2. Transformations of supersessionism in Woolf and Richardson
3. Adding bathrooms, fomenting revolutions
modernity and Jewishness in Woolf and Warner
4. The race must go on
gender, Jewishness, and racial continuity in Richardson and Barnes
5. The 'No time region'
time, trauma, and Jewishness in Barnes and Rhys
6. Metatextual Jewishness
shaping feminist modernism
Bibliography.

'... 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