The Jewish American Novel
Philippe Codde
Purdue University Press
ISBN: 978-1-55753-437-8
PhilippeCodde provides a comparative cultural analysis of the so-called JewishRenaissance—the unprecedented success of the Jewish novel in postwarUS—by situating the process and event in the context of threeclosely-related US-American cultural movements: The popularity in theUS of French philosophical and literary existentialism, the increasingvisibility of the Holocaust in US-American life, and the advent ofradical (death-of-God) theology. Codde argues provocatively that theliterary repertoire of the postwar Jewish novel in the US—analyzed from1944 to 1969—consists of an amalgam of cultural elements that weremaking their mark in the political, religious, and philosophicalsystems of the US after the Second World War. Codde proposes that thisamalgam explains—in part—the Jewish novel’s sweeping success in theUS--American literary system. In his book, Codde traces for the firsttime this intriguing thematic admixture in the works of some well-knownand some forgotten but fascinating Jewish American novelists: SaulBellow, Bernard Malamud, Edward Lewis Wallant, Isaac Rosenfeld, DanielStern, Jonathan Baumbach, and NormaRosen. In its displacement of canonical barriers and its inclusivethematic movement, the book addresses and resolves a double lacuna inUS--American
literary historiography.
Philippe Code isAssistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Ghent University. Hehas published articles on a variety of topics (especially JewishAmerican literature, French literary and philosophical existentialism,polysystem theory, and trauma studies) in journals including PoeticsToday, Yiddish (Modern Jewish Studies), Partial Answers, Studies inAmerican 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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