New PDF release: Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English

By Michael Ragussis

ISBN-10: 0822315599

ISBN-13: 9780822315599

ISBN-10: 082231570X

ISBN-13: 9780822315704

"I knew a guy, who having not anything yet a precis idea of faith himself, and being depraved and profligate to the final measure in his existence, made an intensive Reformation in himself, by means of labouring to transform a Jew."
—Daniel Defoe, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719)

When the hero of Defoe’s novel listens skeptically to this anecdote comparable through a French Roman Catholic priest, he little suspects that during under a century the conversion of the Jews might turn into not anything in need of a countrywide project—not in France yet in England. during this ebook, Michael Ragussis explores the phenomenon of Jewish conversion—the topic of well known enthusiasm, public scandal, nationwide debate, and dubbed "the English insanity" by way of its critics—in Protestant England from the 1790s throughout the 1870s.
Moving past the prevalent catalog of anti-Semitic stereotypes, Ragussis analyzes the rhetoric of conversion because it was once reinvented through the English in sermons, tales for the younger, histories of the Jews, memoirs via Jewish converts, and renowned novels. along those texts and the countertexts produced via English Jews, he situates such writers as Edgeworth, Scott, Disraeli, Arnold, Trollope, and Eliot in the debate over conversion and comparable problems with race, gender, and nation-formation. His paintings finds how a robust team of emergent cultural projects—including a revisionist culture of the unconventional, the hot technological know-how of ethnology, and the rewriting of ecu history—redefined English nationwide id in line with the ideology of conversion, the background of the Jews, and "the Jewish question."
Figures of Conversion deals a completely new means of relating to Jewish id in nineteenth-century British tradition and should be of significance not just to literary students but in addition to students of Judaic and spiritual stories, background, and cultural studies.

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