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9781501324734

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In Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth, Brett Kaplan offers a timely reassessment of the notion of 'Jewish anxiety.' Roth's fiction, Kaplan brilliantly argues, exposes an essential contradiction in contemporary Jewish moral life, often displaced into his representations of race, gender, and sexuality. By moving beyond the conventional account of how Roth returns to the mid-century past-how the Jews Roth writes about are driven by fear that anti-Semitism may again victimize Jews as the millions were in the Holocaust-Kaplan engages Roth in ongoing history. She uncovers in his fiction an antithetical anxiety among Jews who confront how Jewish actions during the Israel-Palestine conflict may victimize others. Kaplan's exceptional historical insight enables her to discern in the politics of Roth's novels the manifold ways in which the contemporary Jew may experience moral ambivalence. Kaplan's book will change the way that readers think about Roth and the Jews. Debra Shostak, Mildred Foss Thompson Professor of English Language and Literature, The College of Wooster, USA This is a perceptive, perspicacious and provocative book that offers fresh, persuasive readings of many of Roth's key works. Kaplan has read widely and thought carefully about the tensions that animate Roth's work and her study will be very valuable to both scholars and students. David Brauner, Professor of Contemporary Literature, The University of Reading, UK This engaging study of dual anxiety in Roth's work - linked to victimization and perpetration -- breaks new ground in its analysis of his fiction. Widening the complex nature of anxiety and linking it to race and history, Kaplan successfully shows Roth's strategies in facing the complex double bind of his characters. Ira B. Nadel, Professor of English, University of British Columbia, Canada

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Brett Ashley Kaplan is Professor and Conrad Humanities Scholar in the Program in Comparative and World Literature and the Program in Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA.

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