Download or read book Howard Jacobson s Novels in the Context of Contemporary British Jewish Literature written by Anténe, Petr and published by Palacky University Olomouc. This book was released on with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The novelist Howard Jacobson, who received the 2010 Booker Prize for The Finkler Question, has often been characterized as the ""British Philip Roth"",although he himself prefers to be viewed as the ""Jewish Jane Austen"". This monograph concludes that both comparisons may be used to comment on various features of Jacobson's oeuvre. Like Roth, Jacobson tends to focus on male Jewish protagonists and intimate relations between the sexes. Like Austen, he portrays a certain social class, whether it be the British Jewish minority or the social world of British writers and university professors. Apart from reflecting on the tension between Britishness and Jewishness as inseparable aspects of his characters' identities, Jacobson's novels contribute to the traditions of British and Jewish humour.
Download or read book Howard Jacobson s Novels in the Context of Contemporary British Jewish Literature written by Petr Anténe and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Finkler Question written by Howard Jacobson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-09-10 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "He should have seen it coming. His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one..." Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular and disappointed BBC worker, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they've never quite lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevick, a Czechoslovakian always more concerned with the wider world than with exam results. Now, both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor's grand, central London apartment. It's a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better, perhaps, to go through life without knowing happiness at all because that way you had less to mourn? Treslove finds he has tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his friends' losses. And it's that very evening, at exactly 11:30pm, as Treslove hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country as he walks home, that he is attacked. After this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change. The Finkler Question is a scorching story of exclusion and belonging, justice and love, ageing, wisdom and humanity. Funny, furious, unflinching, this extraordinary novel shows one of our finest writers at his brilliant best.
Download or read book Howard Jacobson written by David Brauner and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a comprehensive and definitive study of the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist, Howard Jacobson. It offers lucid, detailed and nuanced readings of each of Jacobson’s novels, and makes a powerful case for the importance of his work in the landscape of contemporary fiction. Focusing on the themes of comedy, masculinity and Jewishness, the book emphasises the richness and diversity of Jacobson’s work. Often described by others as ‘the English Philip Roth’ and by himself as ‘the Jewish Jane Austen’, Jacobson emerges here as a complex and often contradictory figure: a fearless novelist; a combative public intellectual; a polemical journalist; an unapologetic elitist and an irreverent outsider; an exuberant iconoclast and a sombre satirist. Never afraid of controversy, Jacobson tends to polarise readers; but love him or hate him, he is difficult to ignore. This book gives him the thorough consideration and the balanced evaluation that he deserves.
Download or read book Myth and Fairy Tale in Contemporary Fiction written by Alexandra Cheira and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2023-03-28 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides more sustained critical attention on the use of myth and fairy tales in contemporary fiction, both stand-alone tales and those which are embedded in the wider frame of a novel or novella. In this light, the book examines contemporary retellings of myths and fairy tales in a productive dialogue with tradition as an extended appreciation of this productive creative and theoretical dialogue. The individual chapters evince a robust variety of conceptions and approaches, all thoroughly observant of the nature and workings of the relationship between story and genre, and theoretically informed by innovative critical approaches. Hence, the volume demonstrates the undeniable importance of myth and fairy tales in contemporary fiction, suggesting questions for future consideration, and hopefully pointing towards new texts and new critical inquiries.
Download or read book Howard Jacobson written by David Brauner and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a comprehensive and definitive study of the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist, Howard Jacobson. It offers lucid, detailed and nuanced readings of each of Jacobson's novels, and makes a powerful case for the importance of his work in the landscape of contemporary fiction. Focusing on the themes of comedy, masculinity and Jewishness, the book emphasises the richness and diversity of Jacobson's work. Often described by others as 'the English Philip Roth' and by himself as 'the Jewish Jane Austen', Jacobson emerges here as a complex and often contradictory figure: a fearless novelist; a combative public intellectual; a polemical journalist; an unapologetic elitist and an irreverent outsider; an exuberant iconoclast and a sombre satirist. Never afraid of controversy, Jacobson tends to polarise readers; but love him or hate him, he is difficult to ignore. This book gives him the thorough consideration and the balanced evaluation that he deserves. This book will be of interest to readers and scholars of contemporary fiction, twenty-first century literature and Jewish literature.
Download or read book The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction written by Huw Marsh and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction explores the importance of comedy in contemporary literature and culture. In an era largely defined by a mood of crisis, bleakness, cruelty, melancholia, environmental catastrophe and collapse, Huw Marsh argues that contemporary fiction is as likely to treat these subjects comically as it is to treat them gravely, and that the recognition and proper analysis of this humour opens up new ways to think about literature. Structured around readings of authors including Martin Amis, Nicola Barker, Julian Barnes, Jonathan Coe, Howard Jacobson, Magnus Mills and Zadie Smith, this book suggests not only that much of the most interesting contemporary writing is funny and that there is a comic tendency in contemporary fiction, but also that this humour, this comic licence, allows writers of contemporary fiction to do peculiar and interesting things – things that are funny in the sense of odd or strange and that may in turn inspire a funny turn in readers. Marsh offers a series of original critical and theoretical frameworks for discussing questions of literary genre, style, affect and politics, demonstrating that comedy is an often neglected mode that plays a generative role in much of the most interesting contemporary writing, creating sites of rich political, stylistic, cognitive and ethical contestation whose analysis offers a new perspective on the present.
Download or read book Writing Jewish written by Ruth Gilbert and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-12-04 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British-Jewish writers are increasingly addressing challenging questions about what it means to be both British and Jewish in the twenty-first century. Writing Jewish provides a lively and accessible introduction to the key issues in contemporary British-Jewish fiction, memoirs and journalism, and explores how Jewishness exists alongside a range of other different identities in Britain today. By interrogating myths and stereotypes and looking at themes of remembering and forgetting, belonging and alienation, location and dislocation, Ruth Gilbert examines how these writers identify the particularity of their difference – while acknowledging that this difference is neither fixed nor final, but always open to re-interpretation.
Download or read book Jewish Identities in Contemporary Europe written by Andrea Reiter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing an assessment of Jewish identity, this volume presents critical engagements with a number of Jewish writers and filmmakers from a variety of European countries, including Austria, France, Germany, Poland, and the UK. The novels and films discussed explore the meaning of being Jewish in Europe today, and investigate the extent to which this experience is shaped by factors that lie outside the national context, notably by the relationship to Israel. As the recent attacks on Charlie Hebdo, and the targeting of a Jewish supermarket in Paris, demonstrate, these questions are more pressing than ever, and will challenge Jews, as well as Jewish writers and intellectuals, as they explore the answers. This book was originally published as a special issue of Jewish Culture and History.
Download or read book Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction written by David Brauner and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-07 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides critical overviews of the main writers and key themes of Anglophone Jewish fictionThis collection of essays represents a new departure for, and a potentially (re)defining moment in, literary Jewish Studies. It is the first volume to bring together essays covering a wide range of American, British, South African, Canadian and Australian Jewish fiction. Moreover, it complicates all these terms, emphasising the porousness between different national traditions and moving beyond traditional definitions of Jewishness. For the sake of structural clarity, the volume is divided into three parts American Jewish Fiction British Jewish Fiction and International and Transnational Anglophone Jewish Fiction but many of the essays cross over these boundaries and speak to each other implicitly, as well as, on occasion, explicitly. Extending and redefining the canon of modern Jewish fiction, the volume juxtaposes major authors with more marginal figures, revising and recuperating individual reputations, rediscovering forgotten and discovering new work, and in the process remapping the whole terrain. This volume opens windows onto vistas that previously had been obscured and opens doors for the next generation of studies that could not proceed without a wide-ranging, visionary empiricism grounding their work. The Edinburgh Companion is a paradigm-changing event, and nothing in Jewish literary studies that follows can fail to pay close attention to it. Key Features:Highlights the rich diversity of the field and identifies its key themes, including immigration, the Diaspora, the Holocaust, Judaism, assimilation, antisemitism and ZionismAnalyses the main trends in Anglophone Jewish fiction and situates them in historical contextDiscusses the place of Anglophone Jewish fiction in relation to critical debates concerning transatlanticism and transnationalism; ethnicity and identity politics; postcolonial studies, feminist studies and Jewish Studies. With a preface by Mark Shechner, the volume contains 28 essays by contributors including Vicki Aarons (Trinity University, Texas), Debra Shostak (Wooster College, Ohio), Ira Nadel (University of British Columbia), Efraim Sicher (Ben-Gurion University, Phyllis Lassner (Northwestern University), Sue Vice (University of Sheffield), Lori Harrison-Kahan (Boston College), Ruth Gilbert (University of Winchester), Beate Neumeier (University of Cologne) andSandra Singer (University of Guelph).David Brauner is Professor of Contemporary Literature at The University of Reading.Axel Sta er is Reader in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent, Canterbury.
Download or read book The Poetics of Otherness and Transition in Naomi Alderman s Fiction written by José M. Yebra and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book on Naomi Alderman’s literary production, and highlights the writer’s transcultural recasting of British and Jewish traditions. The four novels analysed here prove to be relevant, not only from a literary viewpoint, but also from the fields of ethics, spirituality and politics. The analysis thus focuses on issues such as alterity and respect towards the other in a globalized context. As such, the book will be of interest to literary critics, researchers, and students in the fields of literature, ethics, and social and cultural studies. The reader will find in the text a comprehensive approach to a young writer who undoubtedly deserves attention given her interrogation of varied and socially relevant topics, including gender and sexual orientation in the early twenty-first century, the rewriting of the Sacred Scriptures, and the discourse of feminist posthuman dystopias.
Download or read book Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction written by David Brauner and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-07 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a critical overviews of the main writers and key themes of Anglophone Jewish fiction; highlighting the rich diversity of the field, identifying key themes, analysing the main trends in Anglophone Jewish fiction and situating them in a historical context.
Download or read book Roots Schmoots written by Howard Jacobson and published by Abrams. This book was released on 1995-08-01 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When fast-breaking political events forced British novelist Jacobson (Peeping Tom) to put off a trip to Lithuania planned as a search for his Jewish roots, he accepted an offer from the BBC to visit Jewish communities around the globe instead. This informed and witty account of his experiences deals with the wide variety of contemporary Jewish life, as well as with how Jacobson's observations affected his own concept of what it means to be a Jew. Riding an emotional roller coaster, he witnessed the hostility between Jews and African Americans in New York City, attended services in a gay synagogue in California and found his basic cynicism about religion reinforced after he spent time with Orthodox Jews in Israel, although his spirits were lifted by a visit to an idealistic, tolerant Israeli kibbutz. His journey concluded with the postponed trip to Lithuania, where the author found virulent anti-Semitism.
Download or read book Kalooki Nights written by Howard Jacobson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-04-22 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize and hailed by "The Times" (London) as Ra work of genius, S Jacobson's exquisitely written, audaciously funny novel explores the countless questions of postwar Jewish identity.
Download or read book Contemporary Jewish Writing in Europe written by Vivian Liska and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2007-12-05 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With contributions from a dozen American and European scholars, this volume presents an overview of Jewish writing in post--World War II Europe. Striking a balance between close readings of individual texts and general surveys of larger movements and underlying themes, the essays portray Jewish authors across Europe as writers and intellectuals of multiple affiliations and hybrid identities. Aimed at a general readership and guided by the idea of constructing bridges across national cultures, this book maps for English-speaking readers the productivity and diversity of Jewish writers and writing that has marked a revitalization of Jewish culture in France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, and Russia.
Download or read book Under Postcolonial Eyes written by Efraim Sicher and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Western literary tradition, the "jew" has long been a figure of ethnic exclusion and social isolation--the wanderer, the scapegoat, the alien. But it is no longer clear where a perennial outsider belongs. This provocative study of contemporary British writing points to the figure of the "jew" as the litmus test of multicultural society. Efraim Sicher and Linda Weinhouse examine the "jew" as a cultural construction distinct from the "Jewishness" of literary characters in novels by, among others, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Doris Lessing, Monica Ali, Caryl Philips, and Zadie Smith, as well as contemporary art and film. Here the image of the "jew" emerges in all its ambivalence, from postcolonial migrant and modern everyman to more traditional representations of the conspirator and malefactor. The multicultural discourses of ethnic and racial hybridity reflect dissolution of national and personal identities, yet the search for transnational, cultural forms conceals both the acceptance of marginal South Asian, Caribbean, and Jewish voices as well as the danger of resurgent antisemitic tropes. Innovative in its contextualization of the "jew" in the multiculturalism debate in contemporary Britain, Under Postcolonial Eyes: Figuring the "jew" in Contemporary British Writing analyzes the narrative of identities in a globalized culture and offers new interpretations of postmodern classics.
Download or read book Tracing Topographies Revisiting the Concentration Camps Seventy Years after the Liberation of Auschwitz written by Joanne Pettitt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seventy years on from the liberation of Auschwitz, the contributions collected in this volume each attempt, in various ways and from various perspectives, to trace the relationship between Nazi-occupied spaces and Holocaust memory, considering the multitude of ways in which the passing of time impacts upon, or shapes, cultural constructions of space. Accordingly, this volume does not consider topographies merely in relation to geographical landscapes but, rather, as markers of allusions and connotations that must be properly eked out. Since space and time are intertwined, if not, in fact, one and the same, an investigation of the spaces – the locations of horror – in relation to the passing of time might provide some manner of comprehension of one of the most troubling moments in human history. It is with this understanding of space, as fluid sites of memory that the contributors of this volume engage: these are the kind of shifting topographies that we are seeking to trace. This book was originally published as a special issue of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History.
