Post-War Jewish Fiction

Ambivalence, Self Explanation and Transatlantic Connections

D. Brauner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780333740354
• eBook ISBN: 9780230501492
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

In this groundbreaking study, David Brauner explores the representation of Jewishness in a number of works by postwar British and American Jewish writers, identifying a transatlantic sensibility characterised by an insistent compulsion to explain themselves and their Jewishness in ambivalent terms. Through detailed readings of novels by famous American authors such as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud and Arthur Miller, alongside those by lesser-known British writers such as Frederic Raphael, Jonathan Wilson, Howard Jacobson and Clive Sinclair, certain common preoccupations emerge: Gentiles who mistake themselves for Jews; Jewish hostility towards Nature; writing (and not writing) about the Holocaust, and the relationship between fact and fiction.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Explaining Themselves: Ambivalent Representations of Jewishness in Post-War British- and American-Jewish Fiction
• 2 The Gentile Who Mistook Himself for a Jew
• 3 Nature Anxiety, Homosocial Desire and (Sub)urban Paranoia: the Jewish Anti-Pastoral
• 4 Breaking the Silence: Jewish Women Writing the War and the War After
• 5 Philip Roth and Clive Sinclair: Portraits of the Artist as a Jew(ish Other)
• Afterword
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index