(Minor Field) "Englishness" and "Jewishness"

RATIONALE Given the fact that in 1851 there were only 35,000 Jews in England and Wales combined, it is striking that "Jewishness" plays such a notable role in 19th-century fiction and cultural criticism. The central project of this field is to explain the significant presence of Jewish themes in Victorian literature. My guiding assumption is that these texts have something to say not only about what it means to be Jewish but, often more complexly, what it mean to be English. Thus, Scott's Ivanhoe and Eliot's Daniel Deronda use Jewish characters as way of discussing national identity. Questions of national as well as individual identity are also very much at stake in literature dealing with "conversion." While focusing on fiction's participation in and depiction of Jewish conversion, I want to consider conversion as it operates in the larger context of Victorian narrative: from Hopkin's conversion to Catholicism, to Mill's "intellectual conversion," to Ruskin's spiritual "unconversion," so many 19th-century texts deal with moments that alter identity in some form. Finally, I am intrigued by the way these texts often depict the intersection between Judaism, fin-de-siècle aesthetics, and ideas of cultural and racial degeneracy. Especially relevant here is the popular figure of the Jewish artist. Present in Daniel Deronda, Trilby, and "The Alien Corn," The Jewish Artist combined an artistic prowess and cosmopolitanism that were at once captivating and unsettling. Since "Jewishness" was an unstable category variously racial, religious, and national it played right into Victorian anxieties about cultural mixing and national decline in what Mathew Arnold ambiguously termed an "epoch of expansion." Ultimately, this field allows me to examine certain canonical 19th-century novels from an unconventional angle that of Jewishness as well as to bring less familiar texts into the picture in order to flesh out my understanding of the Victorian and early Modernist cultural landscape.

PRIMARY READINGS Maria Edgeworth — Harrington (1817) Sir Walter Scott — Ivanhoe (1819) William Wordsworth — "Song for a Wandering Jew;" "A Jewish Family" (c. 1828) Thomas De Quincey — "The Avenger" (1828) Benjamin Disraeli — Sybil (1845) Charles Dickens — Oliver Twist (1838) Osborn Heighway — Leila Ada, The Jewish Convert: An Authentic Memoir (1853) Robert Browning — "Rabbi Ben Ezra" (1864) Matthew Arnold — Culture and Anarchy (1867) Anthony Trollope — The Way We Live Now (1875) George Eliot — Daniel Deronda (1876) — "The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!" (1879) "Frank Danby" (a.k.a. Julia Frankau) — Dr. Phillips, A Maida Vale Idyll (1887) George Du Maurier — Trilby (1894) Henry James — The Golden Bowl (1904) W. Somerset Maugham — "The Alien Corn" T.S. Eliot — "Gerontion," "After Strange Gods" (c. 1920)

ECRITICISM Bryan Cheyette — Constructions of the Jew in English Literature and Society Modernity, Culture, & `the Jew' David Feldman — Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture 1840 1914 — "The Importance of Being English: Jewish Immigration and the Decay of Liberal England" in Metropolis: London Histories and Representations since 1800 (1989) Sander Gilman — The Jew's Body Tony Kushner, ed. — The Jewish Heritage in British History: Englishness and Jewishness Max Nordau — Degeneration Michael Ragussis — Figures of Conversion Gauri Viswanathan — Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, Belief