Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity

Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity - Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture

Hardback (12 Mar 2010)

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Publisher's Synopsis

For generations of German-speaking Jews, the works of Goethe and Schiller epitomized the world of European high culture, a realm that Jews actively participated in as both readers and consumers. Yet from the 1830s on, Jews writing in German also produced a vast corpus of popular fiction that was explicitly Jewish in content, audience, and function. Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity offers the first comprehensive investigation in English of this literature, which sought to navigate between tradition and modernity, between Jewish history and the German present, and between the fading walls of the ghetto and the promise of a new identity as members of a German bourgeoisie. This study examines the ways in which popular fiction assumed an unprecedented role in shaping Jewish identity during this period. It locates in nineteenth-century Germany a defining moment of the modern Jewish experience and the beginnings of a tradition of Jewish belles lettres that is in many ways still with us today.

Book information

ISBN: 9780804761222
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Imprint: Stanford University Press
Pub date:
DEWEY: 833.7098924
DEWEY edition: 22
Language: English
Number of pages: 259
Weight: 499g
Height: 229mm
Width: 155mm
Spine width: 25mm