Jewish Feeling: Difference and Affect in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Women's Writing (New Directions in Religion and Literature) - Hardcover

Richa Dwor's illuminating study ... deftly combines philosophy, theology and literature to demonstrate a new category of affect - both Midrashic and secular - manifest in the realm of nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish female writing. * Times Literary Supplement * Although studies of Jews in British literature and culture are plentiful, studies devoted to early Anglo-Jewish authors are extremely rare. ... Dwor does a considerable service in adding to the current scholarship on Aguilar and Levy, who have both enjoyed something of a renaissance in the past two decades. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the history of Anglo-Jewish literature and culture, Jewish women writers, and Victorian fiction and religion more generally. * Religion and the Arts * Richa Dwor's Jewish Feeling is an important contribution to studies of 19th-century Anglo-Jewish women as writers and of Jews as subjects in their work. ... Dwor's compelling thesis is that 19th-century Jewish women writers, specifically in fiction and poetry, developed a midrashic technique of persuading through affect - developing and appealing to affectus - as they evoked Jewish difference and elaborated visions for the future of Jews in Britain. ... Jewish Feeling grapples well with its potentially slippery topic. Dwor draws amply on recent criticism and theory, placing her study within the important and growing fields of Anglo-Jewish literary and cultural criticism. This book makes significant contributions to both. * Literature and History *

Jewish Feeling brings together affect theory and Jewish Studies to trace Jewish difference in literary works by nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish authors. Dwor argues that midrash, a classical rabbinic interpretive form, is a site of Jewish feeling and that literary works underpinned by midrashic concepts engage affect in a distinctly Jewish way. The book thus emphasises the theological function of literature and also the new opportunities afforded by nineteenth-century literary forms for Jewish women's theological expression.

For authors such as Grace Aguilar (1816-1847) and Amy Levy (1861-1889), feeling is a complex and overlapping category that facilitates the transmission of Jewish ways of thinking into English literary forms. Dwor reads them alongside George Eliot, herself deeply engaged with issues of contemporary Jewish identity. This sheds new light on Eliot by positioning her works in a nexus of Jewish forms and concerns. Ultimately, and despite considerable differences in style and outlook, Aguilar and Levy are shown to deploy Jewish feeling in their ethics of futurity, resistance to conversion and closure, and in their foregrounding of a model of reading with feeling.