Introduces readers to the new perspectives, approaches and interpretive possibilities in Jewish American literature that emerged in the twenty-first Century.

A multilingual, transnational literary tradition, Jewish American writing has long explored questions of personal identity and national boundaries. These questions can engage students in literature, writing, or religion; at Jewish, Christian, or secular schools; and in or outside the United States. This volume takes an expansive view of Jewish American literature, beginning with writing from the earliest colonies in the Americas and continuing to contemporary Soviet-born authors in the United States, including works that engage deeply with religious concepts and others that embrace assimilation. It invites readers to rethink the nature of American multiculturalism, suggests pairings of Jewish American texts with other ethnic American literatures, and examines the workings of whiteness and privilege. Contributors offer varied perspectives on classic texts such as Yekl, Bread Givers, and "Goodbye, Columbus," along with approaches to interdisciplinary topics including humor, graphic novels, and musical theater. The volume concludes with an extensive resources section.

Collectively, contributors reframe Jewish American literary history through feminist approaches that have revolutionized the field, from intersectionality and the #MeToo movement to queer theory and disability studies. Examining both canonical and lesser-known texts, this collection asks: what happens to conventional understandings of Jewish American literature when we center women's writing and acknowledge women as dominant players in Jewish cultural production?

This four-volume reference work surveys American literature from the early 20th century to the present day, featuring a diverse range of American works and authors and an expansive selection of primary source materials. Bringing useful and engaging material into the classroom, this four-volume set covers more than a century of American literary history—from 1900 to the present. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context profiles authors and their works and provides overviews of literary movements and genres through which readers will understand the historical, cultural, and political contexts that have shaped American writing. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context provides wide coverage of authors, works, genres, and movements that are emblematic of the diversity of modern America. Not only are major literary movements represented, such as the Beats, but this work also highlights the emergence and development of modern Native American literature, African American literature, and other representative groups that showcase the diversity of American letters. A rich selection of primary documents and background material provides indispensable information for student research.

Benjamin Schreier argues that Jewish American literature's dominant cliché of "breakthrough"—that is, the irruption into the heart of the American cultural scene during the 1950s of Jewish American writers like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley—must also be seen as the critically originary moment of Jewish American literary study. According to Schreier, this is the primal scene of the Jewish American literary field, the point that the field cannot avoid repeating and replaying in instantiating itself as the more or less formalized academic study of Jewish American literature. More than sixty years later, the field's legibility, the very condition of its possibility, remains overwhelmingly grounded in a reliance on this single ethnological narrative. In a polemic against what he sees as the unexamined foundations and stagnant state of the field, Schreier interrogates a series of professionally powerful assumptions about Jewish American literary history—how they came into being and how they hardened into cliché. He offers a critical genealogy of breakthrough and other narratives through which Jewish Studies has asserted its compelling self-evidence, not simply under the banner of the historical realities Jewish Studies claims to represent but more fundamentally for the intellectual and institutional structures through which it produces these representations. He shows how a historicist scholarly narrative quickly consolidated and became hegemonic, in part because of its double articulation of a particular American subject and of a transnational historiography that categorically identified that subject as Jewish. The ethnological grounding of the Jewish American literary field is no longer tenable, Schreier asserts, in an argument with broad implications for the reconceptualization of Jewish and other identity-based ethnic studies.

The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth provides a comprehensive, must-have survey of interdisciplinary scholarship on one of the major American novelists of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth presents state-of-the-art scholarship on new research methods, current debates, and future directions in Philip Roth studies. It illuminates how Roth, one of the most influential American writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, not only reflected American history and culture in his important novels but uncannily anticipated our American future. Divided into six main sections, this Handbook considers such topics: - The full range of Roth's writing, from his novels and short stories to essays and life writing - Major interdisciplinary scholarly perspectives across literary studies, politics, gender studies, critical race theory, and ecocriticism - Roth's literary legacy across contemporary fiction, Jewish literature, the arts, and culture studies - Key contexts including American political movements since the 1950s, the American Jewish experience, and intertextual relationships Uniting scholars and artists who have built the field of Philip Roth studies from the ground up along with emergent scholars from around the world, this Handbook includes chapter summaries, study questions, and an author biography and timeline that includes key dates in Roth's life and publication history. It also contains a bibliography of secondary sources for further reading as well as an overview of film and television adaptations.

Focusing on relationships between Jewish American authors and Jewish authors elsewhere in America, Europe, and Israel, this book explores the phenomenon of authorial affiliation: the ways in which writers intentionally highlight and perform their connections with other writers. Starting with Philip Roth as an entry point and recurring example, David Hadar reveals a larger network of authors involved in formations of Jewish American literary identity, including among others Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Nicole Krauss, and Nathan Englander. He also shows how Israeli writers such as Sayed Kashua perform their own identities through connections to Jewish Americans. Whether by incorporating other writers into fictional work as characters, interviewing them, publishing critical essays about them, or invoking them in paratext or publicity, writers use a variety of methods to forge public personas, craft their own identities as artists, and infuse their art with meaningful cultural associations. Hadar's analysis deepens our understanding of Jewish American and Israeli literature, positioning them in decentered relation with one another as well as with European writing. The result is a thought-provoking challenge to the concept of homeland that recasts each of these literary traditions as diasporic and questions the oft-assumed centrality of Hebrew and Yiddish to global Jewish literature. In the process, Hadar offers an approach to studying authorial identity-building relevant beyond the field of Jewish literature.

The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture reflects current approaches to Holocaust literature that open up future thinking on Holocaust representation. The chapters consider diverse generational perspectives—survivor writing, second and third generation—and genres—memoirs, poetry, novels, graphic narratives, films, video-testimonies, and other forms of literary and cultural expression. In turn, these perspectives create interactions among generations, genres, temporalities, and cultural contexts. The volume also participates in the ongoing project of responding to and talking through moments of rupture and incompletion that represent an opportunity to contribute to the making of meaning through the continuation of narratives of the past. As such, the chapters in this volume pose options for reading Holocaust texts, offering openings for further discussion and exploration. The inquiring body of interpretive scholarship responding to the Shoah becomes itself a story, a narrative that materially extends our inquiry into that history.

Offering a radical critique of contemporary Israeli and diaspora fiction by major writers of the generation after Amos Oz and Philip Roth, this book asks searching questions about identity formation in Jewish spaces in the twenty-first century and posits global, transnational identities instead of the bipolar Israel/diaspora model. The chapters put into conversation major authors such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Michael Chabon, and Nathan Englander with their Israeli counterparts Zeruya Shalev, Eshkol Nevo, and Etgar Keret and shows that they share common themes and concerns. Read through a postmodern lens, their preoccupation with failed marriage and failed ideals brings to the fore the crises of home, nation, historical destiny, and collective memory in contemporary secular Jewish culture. At times provocative, at others iconoclastic, this innovative study must be read by anyone concerned with Jewish culture and identity today, whether scholars, students, or the general reader.

Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Literature offers fresh approaches to understanding how grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and perpetrators treat their traumatic legacies. The contributors to this volume present a two-fold perspective: that the past continues to live in the lives of the third generation and that artistic responses to trauma assume a variety of genres, including film, graphic novels, and literature. This generation is acculturated yet set apart from their peers by virtue of their traumatic inheritance. The chapters raise several key questions: How is it possible to negotiate the difference between what Daniel Mendelson terms proximity and distance? How can the post-post-memorial generation both be faithful to Holocaust memory and embrace a message of hope? Can this generation play a constructive educational role? And, finally, why should society care? At a time when the lessons and legacies of Auschwitz are either banalized or under assault, the authors in this volume have a message which ideally should serve to morally center those who live after the event.