The Jewish American Novel

The Jewish American Novel
Philippe Codde

Purdue University Press
ISBN: 978-1-55753-437-8

Philippe Codde provides a comparative cultural analysis of the so-called Jewish Renaissance—the unprecedented success of the Jewish novel in postwar US—by situating the process and event in the context of three closely-related US-American cultural movements: The popularity in the US of French philosophical and literary existentialism, the increasing visibility of the Holocaust in US-American life, and the advent of radical (death-of-God) theology. Codde argues  provocatively that the literary repertoire of the postwar Jewish novel in the US—analyzed from 1944 to 1969—consists of an amalgam of cultural elements that were making their mark in the political, religious, and philosophical systems of the US after the Second World War. Codde proposes that this amalgam explains—in part—the Jewish novel’s sweeping success in the US--American literary system. In his book, Codde traces for the first time this intriguing thematic admixture in the works of some well-known and some forgotten but fascinating Jewish American novelists: Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Edward Lewis Wallant, Isaac Rosenfeld, Daniel Stern, Jonathan Baumbach, and Norma Rosen. In its displacement of canonical barriers and its inclusive thematic movement, the book addresses and resolves a double lacuna in US--American

literary historiography.

Philippe Code is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Ghent University. He has published articles on a variety of topics (especially Jewish American literature, French literary and philosophical existentialism, polysystem theory, and trauma studies) in journals including Poetics Today, Yiddish (Modern Jewish Studies), Partial Answers, Studies in American Fiction, English Language Notes, and Saul Bellow Journal, as well as in volumes such as Lost on the Map of the World: Jewish-American Women’s Quest for Home in Essays and Memoirs (ed. Phillipa Kafka), and Encyclopedia of Ethnic American Literature (ed. Emmanuel Nelson).

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