The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth by Timothy Parrish (Editor)From the moment that his debut book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), won him the National Book Award, Philip Roth has been among the most influential and controversial writers of our age. Now the author of more than twenty novels, numerous stories, two memoirs, and two books of literary criticism, Roth has used his writing to continually reinvent himself and in doing so to remake the American literary landscape. This Companion provides the most comprehensive introduction to his works and thought in a collection of newly commissioned essays from distinguished scholars. Beginning with the urgency of Roth's early fiction and extending to the vitality of his most recent novels, these essays trace Roth's artistic engagement with questions about ethnic identity, postmodernism, Israel, the Holocaust, sexuality, and the human psyche itself. With its chronology and guide to further reading, this Companion will be essential for new and returning Roth readers, students and scholars.
Location: Online
Publication Date: 2007
The Cambridge Companion to Kafka by Julian Preece (Editor)This Companion of specially-commissioned essays offers a comprehensive account of his life and work, providing a rounded contemporary appraisal of Central Europe's most distinctive Modernist. Contributions cover all the key texts, and discuss Kafka's writing in a variety of critical contexts such as feminism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Jewish studies. The essays are enhanced by supplementary material including a chronology of the period and detailed guides to further reading. They will be of interest to students of German, European and Comparative Literature, and Jewish Studies.
Location: Online
Publication Date: 2002
A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka by James Rolleston (Editor)No other writer of German-language literature in the 20th century has been as fully accepted into the canon of world literature as Franz Kafka. The unsettlingly, enigmatically surreal world depicted in Kafka's novels and stories continues to fascinate readers and critics of each new generation, who in turn continue to find new readings. One thing has become wholly clear: although all theories attempt to appropriate Kafka, there is no one key to his work. The challenge to critics has been to present a strong point of view while taking account of previous Kafka research, a challenge that has been met by the contributors to this volume. The essays follow an introduction by the editor, and include: Clayton Koelb on the controversial question of Kafka editions; Walter H. Sokel on a life of reading--and writing about--Kafka; Judith Ryan on the early stories; Russell A. Berman on tradition and betrayal in `The Judgment'; Ritchie Robertson on anti-Christian elements in `The Judgment,' `The Metamorphosis,' and the aphorisms; Henry Sussman on Kafka's evolving aesthetics; Stanley Corngold on The Trial; Bianca Theisen on Kafka's use of circus motifs in the stories `Up in the Gallery' and `First Sorrow'; Rolf J. Goebel on the connection of Kafka's The Missing Person, `In the Penal Colony,' and `The Great Wall of China' to postcolonial critique; Richard T. Gray on the semiotics and aesthetics of `In the Penal Colony'; Ruth V. Gross on the `enigmatics' of the short fiction; Sander L. Gilman on Kafka's Jewishness and the story `The Country Doctor'; John Zilcosky on the colonial visions in The Castle; Mark Harman on the variants to The Castle and what they tell us about Kafka's writing process; and Clayton Koelb on Kafka's rhetoric in the late stories `Josephine the Singer' and `The Burrow.'BR>James Rolleston is Emeritus Professor of German at Duke University and has written widely on topics in modern German literature.
Location: Fulltext via HathiTrust
Publication Date: 2002
Background Sources
Encyclopaedia JudaicaThis link opens in a new windowEncyclopaedia Judaica provides "an overvew of Jewish life and knowledge from the Second Temple period to the contemporary State of Israel, from Rabbinic to modern Yiddish literature, from Kabbalah to 'Americana' and from Zionism to the contribution of Jews to world cultures,
World History (Gale In Context)This link opens in a new windowCovers ancient history to current events using primary sources, reference information, and multi-media content.
The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature by Michael Kramer (Editor); Hana Wirth-Nesher (Editor); Michael P. Kramer (Editor)For more than two hundred years, Jews have played important roles in the development of American literature. The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature addresses a wide array of themes and approaches to the distinct yet multifaceted body of Jewish American literature. Essays examine writing from the 1700s to major contemporary writers such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Topics covered include literary history, immigration and acculturation, Yiddish and Hebrew literature, popular culture, women writers, literary theory and poetics, multilingualism, the Holocaust, and contemporary fiction. This collection of specially commissioned essays by leading figures discusses Jewish American literature in relation to ethnicity, religion, politics, race, gender, ideology, history, and ethics, and places it in the contexts of both Jewish and American writing. With its chronology and guides to further reading, this volume will prove valuable to scholars and students alike.
Location: Mugar Stacks PS153.J4 C36 2003 and Online
Publication Date: 2003
Modern Hebrew Fiction by Gershon Shaked; Emily Miller Budick (Editor); Yael Lotan (Translator)Gershon Shaked's history of modern Hebrew fiction traces the emergence and development of a literature "against all odds"--from its European roots in the 1880s, when it had neither a country nor a spoken language, to the flowering of a literary culture on Israeli soil through the 1990s. The product of more than 20 years of research, it is unique in its scope, profiling four generations of Hebrew writers.
Location: Mugar Stacks PJ5029 .S5413 2000 and Fulltext via HathiTrust
The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust by Shmuel Spector (Editor); Geoffrey Wigoder (Editor); Elie Wiesel (Introduction by)This three-volume encyclopedia, abridged from a 30-volume set in Hebrew and with a foreword by Elie Wiesel, chronicles Jewish life before and during the Holocaust. Arranged alphabetically by town, thousands of entries explore centuries of Jewish life. Some entries, particularly for large cities, provide information on Jewish residents as early as the Middle Ages and discuss the fate of Jews during the Black Death persecutions (1348-1349) and various pogroms from the 17th to 20th centuries. Each entry provides information on the town's Jewish inhabitants on the eve of German occupation, gives the dates of Jewish roundups and mass executions and estimates how many Jews from that community survived the war. Includes more than 600 black-and-white photographs.
Location: Mugar Reference X DS135.E8 E45 2001
Publication Date: 2001
Turning Points in Jewish History by Marc Rosenstein"Examining the entire span of Jewish history through the lens of thirty pivotal moments in the Jewish people's experience from biblical times through the present, Turning Points in Jewish History provides "the big picture": both a broad and a deep understanding of the Jewish historical experience"--
Contemporary AuthorsThis link opens in a new windowA bio-bibliographical guide to current writers in fiction, general nonfiction, poetry, journalism, drama, motion pictures, television, and other fields.
Biography (Gale in Context)This link opens in a new windowBiography In Context offers biographical information about historically significant figures as well as present-day newsmakers. It includes reference content alongside magazine and journal articles, primary sources, videos, audio podcasts, and images.
Philip Roth: Fiction and Power by Patrick HayesPhilip Roth is widely acknowledged as one of the defining authors in the literature and culture of post-war America. Yet he has long been a polarising figure and throughout his long career he has won the disapproval of an extremely diverse range of public moralists - including, it would seem,the Nobel Prize committee. Far from seeking to make Roth a more palatable writer, Patrick Hayes argues that Roth's interest in transgressing against the "virtue racket", as one of his characters put it, defines his importance.Placing the vehemence and unruliness of human passions at the heart of his writing, Roth is the most subtle exponent of a line of thinking that descends from Nietzsche and which values the arts for their capacity to scrutinise life in an extra-moral way. Philip Roth: Fiction and Power explores thedepth and richness of insight that Roth's fiction thereby generates, and defines what is at stake in his challenge to widely-held assumptions about the ethical value of literature. As well as examining how Roth emerged as a writer and his main lines of influence, it considers his impact on questionsabout the nature and value of tragedy, the relevance of art to life, the relationship between art and the unconscious, the concept of the author, the idea of a literary canon, and how fiction can illuminate America's complex post-war history. It will appeal not only to readers of Americanliterature, but to anyone interested in why literature matters.
Location: Online
Publication Date: 2014
The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: the remarkable life and afterlife of the man who created Tevye by Jeremy DauberNovelist, playwright, journalist, essayist, and editor, Sholem Aleichem was one of the founding giants of modern Yiddish literature and a folk hero in his own right. The creator of a pantheon of memorable characters who have been immortalized in books and plays, he provided readers with a fascinating window onto the world of Eastern European Jews as they began to confront the forces of cultural, political, and religious modernity that tore through the Russian empire in the final decades of the nineteenth century. But just as compelling as the fictional lives of his characters was Sholem Aleichem's own life story. Born Sholem Rabinovitch in Ukraine in 1859, he endured an impoverished childhood, married into fabulous wealth, and then lost it all through bad luck and worse business sense. Turning to his pen to support himself, he switched from writing in Russian and Hebrew to Yiddish in order to create a living body of literature for the Jewish masses. He enjoyed spectacular success as both a writer and a performer of his work in Jewish communities throughout Europe and the United States, and his death from chronic tuberculosis in New York in 1916 was front-page news around the world. His funeral was attended by more than 150,000 people, and aNew York Timeseditorial mourned the loss of "the Jewish Mark Twain." But his greatest fame lay ahead of him, as the English-speaking world began to discover his work in translation and his beloved characters were introduced to an audience that would extend beyond his wildest dreams. In this magnificent biography, we encounter a Sholem Aleichem for the ages. This biography is part of the critically-acclaimed JEWISH ENCOUNTERS series, a collaboration between Schocken Books and Nextbook Press. (With black-and-white illustrations throughout.)
Location: Mugar Stacks PJ5129.R2 Z576 2013
Publication Date: 2013
The Seven Good Years by Etgar KeretA brilliant, life-affirming, and hilarious memoir from a "genius" (The New York Times) and master storyteller. With illustrations by Jason Polan. The seven years between the birth of Etgar Keret's son and the death of his father were good years, though still full of reasons to worry. Lev is born in the midst of a terrorist attack. Etgar's father gets cancer. The threat of constant war looms over their home and permeates daily life. What emerges from this dark reality is a series of sublimely absurd ruminations on everything from Etgar's three-year-old son's impending military service to the terrorist mind-set behind Angry Birds. There's Lev's insistence that he is a cat, releasing him from any human responsibilities or rules. Etgar's siblings, all very different people who have chosen radically divergent paths in life, come together after his father's shivah to experience the grief and love that tie a family together forever. This wise, witty memoir--Etgar's first nonfiction book published in America, and told in his inimitable style--is full of wonder and life and love, poignant insights, and irrepressible humor.