A Hundred Acres of America

The Geography of Jewish American Literary History
Erscheinungsjahr 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8135-8969-5
Verlag: Rutgers University Press

Buch, Englisch, 198 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 228 mm, Gewicht: 282 g

Jewish writers have long had a sense of place in the United States, and interpretations of American geography have appeared in Jewish American literature from the colonial era forward. But troublingly, scholarship on Jewish American literary history often limits itself to an immigrant model, situating the Jewish American literary canon firmly and inescapably among the immigrant authors and early environments of the early twentieth century. In A Hundred Acres of America, Michael Hoberman combines literary history and geography to restore Jewish American writers to their roles as critical members of the American literary landscape from the 1850s to the present, and to argue that Jewish history, American literary history, and the inhabitation of American geography are, and always have been, contiguous entities.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Jüdische Studien Jüdische Studien
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein
• Sozialwissenschaften Sport | Tourismus | Freizeit Tourismus & Reise Expeditions- & Reiseliteratur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Preface
- Introduction.  “A Never Failing Source of Interest to Us”: Jewish American Literature and the Sense of Place—1-13
- Chapter One.  “In this vestibule of God's holy temple”: the frontier accounts of Solomon Carvalho and Israel Joseph Benjamin, 1857-1862—14-55
- Chapter Two.  Colonial revival in the immigrant city: the invention of Jewish American urban history, 1870-1910—56-98
- Chapter Three.  “A rare good fortune to anyone”: Joseph Leiser's and Edna Ferber's reminiscences of small-town Jewish life, 1909-1939—99-144
- Chapter Four.  “The longed for pastoral”: images of exurban exile in Philip Roth's American Pastoral (1997) and Allegra Goodman's Kaaterskill Falls (1998)—145-186
- Chapter Five.  Return to the shtetl: following the “topological turn” in Rebecca Goldstein's Mazel (1995) and Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated (2002)—187-227
- Chapter Six.  Turning dreamscapes into landscapes on the “Wild West Bank” frontier: Jon
- Papernick's The Ascent of Eli Israel (2002) and Risa Miller's Welcome to Heavenly Heights (2003)—228-266
- Conclusion.  Mystical encounters and ordinary places—267-276
- Acknowledgements
- Notes  
- Index

Über Autor(innen)

Michael Hoberman is a professor of English studies at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. He is the author of several books, including New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America.