Axel Stähler

The Holocaust in the nursery: Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay

With particular attention to Anita Desai’s use of German nursery rhymes and children’s songs, this article offers a reading of the Holocaust narrative in her novel Baumgartner’s Bombay in relation to interpretive expectations informed by discourses of the Holocaust and postcolonialism and to the appropriation of the novel to one or the other of these paradigms. It suggests that the novel transcends such interpretive patterns by structurally engaging the reader’s participation in the creation of meaning.

Antisemitism and Israel in British Jewish fiction: perspectives on Clive Sinclair’s Blood Libels (1985) and Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question (2010)

Recently Howard Jacobson’s Booker Prize winning novel The Finkler Question (2010) and Peter Kosminsky’s controversial TV mini-series The Promise (2011) have forcefully re-introduced the issue of Israel to British Jewish cultural creativity. Both need to be understood not only in the context of contemporary British Jewish cultural creativity but also of the earlier literary engagement with Israel in British Jewish fiction. Focusing in particular on Clive Sinclair’s Blood Libels (1985) and Jacobson’s novel, this article traces notions of Israel in British Jewish fiction since its establishment in 1948 to the present day.

The “Aesthetics” of Fundamentalism in Recent Jewish Fiction in English

In the minds of many Westerners, Muslim fundamentalism has replaced communism as perhaps the greatest single “threat” to the existing world order. From this perspective the Palestinian intifada becomes just another episode in a “clash of civilizations.” For them, there is an intrinsic link between Palestinian “terrorism” and, say, the al-Qaeda bombing of an American warship off Yemen. Almost totally absent from such arguments is any inclination to examine Jewish fundamentalism, or so much as to ask whether it, too, might be a factor in the conflict over Palestine, one of the reasons why it seems so insoluble.

The Re-Conceptualization of Space in Edwardian Prophecy Fiction: Heterotopia, Utopia and the Apocalypse

In the early twentieth century a subgenre of religious writing emerged that has been described as prophecy fiction (Gribben, 2009, p. 22). Like modernist literature, it articulates a reaction to, and against, modernity. However, in contrast to the mostly cerebral and frequently covert engagement of modernist fiction with religious experience recently argued for by Pericles Lewis (p. 51), these texts retorted affirmatively and hortatively to the widespread crisis of faith of their time with literary (re)visions of scriptural apocalyptic prophecy and the remapping of religious community.1 Based on the Book of Revelation, they envisaged the creation of an imaginary community in correlation with a heterotopian and, ultimately, utopian reconfiguration of space. Sydney Watson (1847–1917)2 and Robert Hugh Benson (1871–1914)3 were among the first to explore the emerging genre.4 Widely disseminated in evangelical subculture, like Watson’s seminal rapture trilogy, In the Twinkling of an Eye, The Mark of the Beast and Scarlet and Purple, published probably between 1904–13,5 or attempting to subvert Protestant humanitarianism with a specifically Catholic vision, like Benson’s Lord of the World (1907), these texts offered an affirmative response to the nomic crisis experienced in modern society. More specifically, by realigning prophecy and the perception of reality, these narratives solicited the active participation of their readers in the creation of an imaginary community and its infiltration of the spaces of real life.

Writ(h)ing Images. Imagination, the Human Form, and the Divine in William Blake, Salman Rushdie, and Simon Louvish

Axel Stähler is at the School of European Culture and Languages, University of Kent, UK. An earlier version of this article was delivered at the international conference on ‘‘Literature as Resistance: Challenging Religious, Linguistic, Casteist, Racist and Sexist Essentialisms’’ at the University of Mumbai, India, early in 2006. The conference was organised by Professor Nilufer Bharucha in cooperation with the international research project ‘‘Fundamentalism and Literature’’ under the direction of Professor Dr. Klaus Stierstorfer and based at the University of Münster, Germany. English Studies Vol. 89, No. 1, February 2008, 94 – 117