The New Jewish American Literary Studies

Description

The opening decades of the twenty-first century are distinguished by a newly framed and regenerated outlook of Jewish American literary studies. This volume introduces readers to the new perspectives, new approaches, and widening of interpretive possibilities in Jewish American literature accompanied by the changes of the new millennium. Now that we are over a decade into a new century, the field of Jewish American literary studies has begun to reshape itself in response to a 'new diaspora', a newly defined sense not only of Jewish American literature, but of America, an expansion of new genres, new voices, and new platforms of expression. This book re-evaluates questions of race, feminism, gender, sexuality, orthodoxy, assimilation, identity politics, and historical alienation that shape Jewish American literary studies. Several chapters show the influence of other cultures on the field such as Iranian-American-Jewish writing, Israeli-American, and Latin American literary expression, as well as the impact of Russian emigres.

Victoria Aarons is author of A Measure of Memory (1996) and What Happened to Abraham (2005), both recipients of the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Book, and co-author with Alan L. Berger of Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory (2017). She is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow (Cambridge, 2017) and Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction (2016), and the co-editor of The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction (2015), Bernard Malamud: A Centennial Tribute (2016), and the forthcoming volume New Directions in Jewish American and Holocaust Literature: Reading and Teaching. Aarons is a judge of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, a prize awarded each year to a rising American Jewish writer of fiction. She has published well over seventy scholarly articles and is on the editorial board of Philip Roth Studies, Studies in American Jewish Literature, and Women in Judaism.