Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

   PDF

2. Introduction: The Nation and the Spectral Wandering Jew

   • Carol Margaret Davison

   Pages 1-14

3. The Contested Enlightenment, the Contested Castle

   • Carol Margaret Davison

   Pages 15-33

4. The Primal Scene: The Skeleton in Britain’s Closet

   • Carol Margaret Davison

   Pages 34-54

5. Cabalistic Conspiracies and the Crypto-Jew

   • Carol Margaret Davison

   Pages 55-86

6. The Rise of the Vampiric Wandering Jew: A Sinister German-English Co-Production

   • Carol Margaret Davison

   Pages 87-119

7. Britain, Vampire Empire: Fin-de-Siècle Fears and Bram Stoker’s Dracula

   • Carol Margaret Davison

   Pages 120-157

8. Afterword: Pathological Projection and the Nazi Nightmare

   • Carol Margaret Davison

   Pages 158-165

9. Back Matter

   Pages 166-227

   PDF

Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature examines the Gothic's engagement with the Jewish Question and British national identity over the course of a century. Beginning with an exploration of Jewish demonology from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, Davison interprets the changing significance of the trans-national Wandering Jew in classic Gothic fiction who later migrates into Victorian realism. What emerges is the elucidation of an anti-Semitic 'spectropoetics' that convey how the spectres of Jewish difference and Jewish assimilation haunt British literature.

• English literature
• fiction
• Great Britain
• identity
• Middle Ages
• national identity
• realism
• British and Irish Literature

• University of Windsor, Canada

  Carol Margaret Davison

CAROL MARGARET DAVISON is Acting Director of Women's Studies and Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Windsor, Canada. She has authored numerous articles on women's writing, Gothic, Victorian, postcolonial and African-American literature, and is the editor of the award-winning study, Bram Stoker's Dracula: Sucking Through the Century, 1897-1997. She is currently working on a monograph on the Scottish Gothic literary tradition.

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