Hebrew Gothic

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Karen Grumberg's Hebrew Gothic breaks new ground by providing a sustained examination of Hebrew literature in the light of the Gothic literary tradition. This deftly argued, elegantly written and carefully nuanced book shows how twentieth-century Hebrew writers have appropriated and revised Christian, Anglophone Gothic tropes to challenge standard paradigms of victim and oppressor and find alternative ways of articulating historical rupture. It makes an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on national Gothics, both in its establishing of a distinctive Hebrew Gothic tradition, and in its discovery of a new critical vocabulary for addressing the unique ambivalence of modern Israeli identity. As the fascinating coda exploring twenty-first century Israeli popular culture vividly demonstrates, the questions Grumberg raises remain of continuing and pressing relevance.

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~Catherine Spooner, author of Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic

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Reading Hebrew literature as a gothic literature allows for new, exciting local and transnational relations that challenge the ways in which the history of Hebrew literature is narrated. Karen Grumberg makes a major and vital contribution with writing that is crisp, cogent, and elegant.

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~Adriana X. Jacobs, author of Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry

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Karen Grumberg pursues a timely yet surprising task: to describe and explain the development of the gothic in modern Hebrew literature since the beginning of the twentieth century.

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~Neta Stahl, author of Other and Brother: Jesus in the 20th-Century Jewish Literary Landscape

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Karen Grumberg makes a persuasive argument, supported by comparative references to the Gothic in English, that Hebrew expressions of the Gothic, often regarded as a marginal phenomenon, play a vital role in how Hebrew writers have confronted history, culture, and politics.

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~Robert Alter, author of Hebrew and Modernity

"Grumberg shows that scholarship of Hebrew literature stands to gain from a reassessment of this corpus outside the conventional frameworks of Hebrew literary history and more classical European literature."

~Maya Barzilai - University of Michigan, AJS Review