BIFOCAL LENSES: MEETING SPACES OF JEWISH-AMERICAN AND "MAINSTREAM" AMERICAN LITERATURE

Abstract

This dissertation critically examines the concept of Jewish-American literary hyphenation, analyzing its historical and theoretical consequences (chapters one and two), then applying the results of that analysis to three pairs of texts: Mary Antin's The Promised Land (1912) and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) (chapter three); Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) and William Dean Howells' The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) (chapter four); and Anzia Yezierska's Salome of the Tenements (1923) and John Dewey's Democracy and Education (1916) (Chapter five). My thesis is that Jewish-American writers working at the turn of the twentieth century negotiated a space for themselves inside of the American literary mainstream and that their reception currently continues to be defined by confining systems of literary hyphenation.