The Jewess in nineteenth-century British literary culture

"Stories about Jewesses proliferated in nineteenth-century Britain as debates raged about the place of the Jews in the modern nation. Challenging the emphasis in previous scholarship on antisemitic stereotypes in this period, Nadia Valman argues that the literary image of the Jewess - virtuous, appealing and sacrificial - reveals how hostility towards Jews was accompanied by pity, identification and desire. Reading a range of texts from popular romance to the realist novel, she investigates how the complex figure of the Jewess brought the instabilities of nineteenth-century religious, racial and national identity into uniquely sharp focus. Tracing the Jewess's narrative from its beginnings in Romantic and Evangelical literature, and reading canonical writers including Walter Scott, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope alongside more minor figures such as Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Grace Aguilar and Amy Levy, Valman demonstrates the myriad transformations of this story across the century, as well as its remarkable persistence and power."--BOOK JACKET.