OVERVIEW
The primary purpose of my orals
fields is to get a broad yet detailed sense of British
literature between roughly 1820 and 1930. Collectively,
my fields investigate the continuities as well as
the changes during this period of transition from
the "Victorian" to the "Modernist"
labels that I will question. Since my lists parallel
or follow one another chronologically, they supplement
each other in important ways. In fact, books on
one list could often be located just as aptly on
another: Ivanhoe, Oliver Twist, Daniel
Deronda, and Trilby, for example, while
most interesting to me because of their representations
of Jewish characters, all help to round out my sense
of the Victorian Novel. Likewise, David Weir's Decadence
and the Making of Modernism and Leavis's New
Bearings in English Poetry bridge the gap between
late Victorian aesthetics and the beginnings of
Modernist narrative. Although varied in their specific
emphases, all my fields analyze the ways in which
their texts struggle with the definition both of
what it means to be "literature" as in
the Modernists' experiments with narrative form
and as in Victorian novelists' fascination with
Judaism to be "English."
I have chosen texts that interest me for their involvement
in certain debates over the nature of art, morality,
conversion, realism, cultural identity to name the
most central. But I have also selected many of these
texts because they interest me as distinguished,
indeed pleasurable, works of art. The combination
of these two principles of selection will, I hope,
guide my examination of a period as rich in its
literary production as it is intricate in its cultural
preoccupations.
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