From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Literature

Volume, measuring approximately 5.75" x 9", is bound in green cloth, with stamped gilt lettering tos spine. Book is like new. Price-clipped dust jacket displays chip at top edge of spine panel and otherwise exhibits very light shelfwear. viii/388 pages.

"The extraordinarily brilliant and original treatment of this theme brings to life some of the most vivid characters in the English novel -- Isaac and Rebecca, Fagin, Melmotte, Deronda, Svengali. Centering his attention on nineteenth-century fiction, the author not only traces the main elements of the stereotype -- the Jew as mutilator, bogey, petty thief and colossal parasite -- but also offers fresh appraisals of the novelists themselves. Along the way he examines a number of works that have not before received critical attention: Scott's "The Surgeon's Daughter," Edgeworth's "Harrington," and Bulwer's "My Novel."
Centuries before Shakespeare gave classic expression to the myth of the Jewish criminal, the type had been established in dramatic and balladic literature. Part I of the study brings the stereotype down to the nineteenth century and introduces the central antithesis: Shylock the villain and Sheva the paragon, the corrective to Shylock who emerges in the sentimental novel of the Enlightenment. Part II examines the Shylock legend as it reappears in "Ivanhoe" and "Oliver Twist" and the countermyth as it devolves on George Eliot. To complement what he regards as a basically static convention, the author traces, in Part III, the metamorphoses of the Wandering Jew from his obscure origins to his rejuvenation in Lewis's "The Monk," Godwin's "St. Leon," and Du Maurier's "Trilby." Throughout the study, the author considers the dominant images, motifs, and attitudes that pervade the Jew's fictional history, including the uses to which novelists have put the legend of the Jew's Daughter and the tendency to dramatize the Jew vividly in his criminal role while treating the antitype as a barely animated puppet. Surveying the stereotypes available to the late Victorians, Mr. Rosenberg essays in his final chapter a composite portrait of the Jew as he looked to writers like Reade and Lever, Meredith and Besant.
Extracts from the writings of Holinshed, Pepys, Macaulay, and others, gathered in the Appendix illuminate this study. Illustrations are from the works of Rowlandson, Doré, Cruikshank, and Du Maurier."