"A never failing source of interest to us" : Jewish American literature and the sense of place -- "In this vestibule of God's holy temple" : the frontier accounts of Solomon Carvalho and Israel Joseph Benjamin, 1857-1862 -- Colonial revival in the immigrant city : the invention of Jewish American urban history, 1870-1910 -- "A rare good fortune to anyone" : Joseph Leiser's and Edna Ferber's reminiscences of small-town Jewish life, 1909-1939 -- "The longed for pastoral" : images of exurban exile in Philip Roth's American pastoral (1997) and Allegra Goodman's Kaaterskill Falls -- Return to the shtetl : following the "topological turn" in Rebecca Goldstein's Mazel (1995) and Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is illuminated -- Turning dreamscapes into landscapes on the "wild West Bank" frontier : Jon Papernick's The ascent of Eli Israel (2002) and Risa Miller's Welcome to heavenly heights -- Mystical encounters and ordinary places.
Summary:
In A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History, Michael Hoberman introduces cultural geography as an alternative approach to the immigrant model. Cultural geography allows Hoberman to restore Jewish American writers to their roles as important, active members of the American literary landscape from the 1850s to the present, and to argue that Jewish history, American literary history, and the inhabitation of American geography are, and always have been, contiguous entities. A Hundred Acres of America makes its case by investigating both canonical and extra-canonical literary depictions of six geographies: the frontier, the small town, the urban, the suburban, America as seen from Europe, and Israel as seen from America. Hoberman reads dozens of representative texts closely, and analyzes a wide range of authors, from frontier-era memoirists and turn-of-the-century native-born reformers to contemporary novelists. He adroitly demonstrates that Jewish American authors are not only present throughout American literary history, but actively shaped this history with writings that often subverted or contradicted the ways their non-Jewish peers depicted these geographies"-- Provided by publisher.
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