The extraordinary range of responses to Jewish culture and history in the work of these writers will appeal to literary scholars and readers interested in Jewish women's history.

From the shtetl to the Holocaust, lost voices from a rich and lively tradition.

In this sparkling debut, a young critic offers an original, passionate, and erudite account of what it means to feel Jewish—even when you’re not. Self-hatred. Guilt. Resentment. Paranoia. Hysteria. Overbearing Mother-Love. In this witty, insightful, and poignant book, Devorah Baum delves into fiction, film, memoir, and psychoanalysis to present a dazzlingly original exploration of a series of feelings famously associated with modern Jews. Reflecting on why Jews have so often been depicted, both by others and by themselves, as prone to “negative” feelings, she queries how negative these feelings really are. And as the pace of globalization leaves countless people feeling more marginalized, uprooted, and existentially threatened, she argues that such “Jewish” feelings are becoming increasingly common to us all. Ranging from Franz Kafka to Philip Roth, Sarah Bernhardt to Woody Allen, Anne Frank to Nathan Englander, Feeling Jewish bridges the usual fault lines between left and right, insider and outsider, Jew and Gentile, and even Semite and anti-Semite, to offer an indispensable guide for our divisive times.

In its analysis of Anglo-Jewish women writing the Holocaust, this book highlights the necessity of their inclusion in the evolving canon of modern British literature, by showing how these writers complicate theories of trauma and memory by using fantasy and the Gothic as a response to silence.

Since the late twentieth century, there has been a strategic campaign to recover the impact of Victorian women writers in the field of English literature. However, with the increased understanding of the importance of interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century, there is a need to extend this campaign beyond literary studies in order to recognise the role of women writers across the nineteenth century, a time that was intrinsically interdisciplinary in approach to scholarly writing and public intellectual engagement.

Analyses the development of Jewish women's writing in relation to Victorian literary history, women's cultural history, and Jewish cultural history. Between 1830 and 1880, the Jewish community flourished in England. During this time, known as haskalah, or the Anglo-Jewish Enlightenment, Jewish women in England became the first Jewish women anywhere to publish novels, histories, periodicals, theological tracts, and conduct manuals. The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer analyzes this critical but forgotten period in the development of Jewish women's writing in relation to Victorian literary history, women's cultural history, and Jewish cultural history. Michael Galchinsky demonstrates that these women writers were the most widely recognized spokespersons for the haskalah. Their romances, some of which sold as well as novels by Dickens, argued for Jew's emancipation in the Victorian world and women's emancipation in the Jewish world.

This volume charts the rise of professional women writers across diverse fields of intellectual enquiry and through different modes of writing in the period immediately before and during the reign of Queen Victoria. It demonstrates how, between 1830 and 1880, the woman writer became an agent of cultural formation and contestation, appealing to and enabling the growth of female readership while issuing a challenge to the authority of male writers and critics. Of especial importance were changing definitions of marriage, family and nation, of class, and of morality as well as new conceptions of sexuality and gender, and of sympathy and sensation. The result is a richly textured account of a radical and complex process of feminization whereby formal innovations in the different modes of writing by women became central to the aesthetic, social, and political formation of British culture and society in the nineteenth century.

The exuberant recovery from obscurity of scores of British women writers has prompted professors and publishers to revisit publication of women's writings. New curricular inclusion of these sometimes quirky, often passionate writers profoundly disrupts traditional pedagogical assumptions about what constitutes «literature». This book addresses this radically changed educational landscape, offering practical, proven teaching strategies for newly «recovered» writers, both in special-topics courses and in traditional teaching environments. Moreover, it addresses the institutional issues confronting feminist scholars who teach women writers in a variety of settings and the kinds of career-altering effects the decision to teach this material can have on junior and senior scholars alike. Collectively, these essays argue that teaching noncanonical women writers invigorates the curriculum as a whole, not only by introducing the voices of women writers, but by incorporating new genres, by asking new questions about readers' assumptions and aesthetic values, and by altering the power relations between teacher and student for the better.

Contemporary Jewish Writing in Britain and Ireland presents a wide range of writers-some at the heart of British culture, others outside the mainstream-who address the issue of Jewish cultural difference in Great Britain and Ireland. Editor Bryan Cheyette has assembled a striking roster of writers whose extraordinary imagination and understanding of Jewish experience in Britain and Ireland have transformed English literature in recent decades. They include established figures like Anita Brookner, Harold Pinter, and George Steiner, as well as such vibrant new voices as Elena Lappin, Jonathan Treitel, and Jonathan Wilson. As Cheyette argues, "the contemporary British-Jewish writers in this volume defy the authority of England and the Anglo-Jewish community. . . . [All] are risk-takers who . . . will eventually help replace narrow national narratives and gendered identities with a broader, more plural, diasporic culture". Bryan Cheyette is a professor of English and drama at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. He is the author of Construction of "the Jew" in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945.

In British Women Writers of World War II , Phyllis Lassner offers a challenging analysis of politicized literature in which such British women writers as Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Stevie Smith and Storm Jameson debated the `justness' of World War II. Lassner questions prevailing approaches to women's war writing by exploring the complex range of pacifist and activist literary forms of women who redefined such pieties as patriotism and duty and heroism and victimization.