Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts Collection

Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature examines the Gothic''s engagement with the Jewish Question and British national identity over the course of a century. Beginning with an exploration of Jewish demonology from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, Davison interprets the changing significance of the trans-national Wandering Jew in classic Gothic fiction who later migrates into Victorian realism. What emerges is the elucidation of an anti-Semitic ''spectropoetics'' that convey how the spectres of Jewish difference and Jewish assimilation haunt British literature.