Review of Nadia Valman. The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture.

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review: Nadia Valman’s book is a well-researched and cogently argued study of the image of the Jewess in nineteenth-century British literary culture. If, as the blurb on the dust jacket puts it, the author desires to challenge “the emphasis in previous scholarship on antisemitic stereotypes in this period,” she impressively succeeds, as she shows how Jewish femininity could be the locus of a wide range of discursive negotiations. Through five extensive case studies, Valman demonstrates that the Jewess was simultaneously cast as an object of idealisation and an object of interventionist strategies which aimed at her conversion or “civil improvement.” Whether these strategies were evangelical or emancipatory, conservative or radical in nature, the issue of gender was always a complicating factor: it confused the other “categories of difference” of the discursive formation at stake, and often revealed their instability and contradictions.