Constructions of 'the Jew' in English Literature and Society

Literary critics and cultural historians have for too long written the question of race out of mainstream accounts of English literature. In this work, Bryan Cheyette draws on a wide range of literary texts and social and political perspectives from the 1870s to the 1940s to show that the emerging cultural identity of modern England involved constructing Jews both as a force that could be transformed by a superior culture, and as a race outside the English nation. Dr Cheyette combines cultural theory, discourse analysis and new historicism with close readings of work by Arnold, Trollope and George Eliot, Buchan and Kipling, Shaw and Wells, Belloc and Chesterton, T.S. Eliot and Joyce to argue that the Jew lies at the heart of modern English literature and society: not as a fixed stereotype, but as the embodiment of confusion and indeterminacy.