Synopses & Reviews
The Jew was a common figure in Victorian literature and representations of Jews and Jewish belief were often underpinned by contradictory narratives of race, religion and politics. By contrast, Jewish writers in Victorian England had to negotiate an equally complex clash of identities as they sought accommodation with a predominantly Christian culture.
Jewish Feeling explores how Jewish women writers such as Amy Levy and Grace Aguilar developed a distinctive approach to literary form that contrasted with mainstream Victorian literary appeals to feeling by way of sentimentality and psychological manipulation in the work of novelists such as George Eliot. Along the way, Richa Dwor draws on the latest work in affect theory and religious literary criticism to cast new light on an expanded multicultural notion of British identity in the Victorian era.
Synopsis
Jewish Feeling brings together affect theory and Jewish Studies to trace Jewish difference in literary works by nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish authors. Dwor argues that midrash, a classical rabbinic interpretive form, is a site of Jewish feeling and that literary works underpinned by midrashic concepts engage affect in a distinctly Jewish way. The book thus emphasises the theological function of literature and also the new opportunities afforded by nineteenth-century literary forms for Jewish women's theological expression.
For authors such as Grace Aguilar (1816-1847) and Amy Levy (1861-1889), feeling is a complex and overlapping category that facilitates the transmission of Jewish ways of thinking into English literary forms. Dwor reads them alongside George Eliot, herself deeply engaged with issues of contemporary Jewish identity. This sheds new light on Eliot by positioning her works in a nexus of Jewish forms and concerns. Ultimately, and despite considerable differences in style and outlook, Aguilar and Levy are shown to deploy Jewish feeling in their ethics of futurity, resistance to conversion and closure, and in their foregrounding of a model of reading with feeling.
About the Author
Richa Dwor is Lecturer in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Literature at the University of Leicester, UK.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. 'Finer and Finer Discrimination': George Eliot's Feeling for the Jews
2. 'The Still Undercurrent of Deep Feeling': Conduct and Biography in Grace Aguilar's Milieu
3. 'A Fragment of the Eternal Truth': Psychology and Race for Amy Levy
Conclusion: Esther and Judith in London
Bibliography
Index