1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910465283803321

Autore

Seidman Naomi

Titolo

The marriage plot : or how Jews fell in love with love, and literature / Naomi Seidman. / / Naomi Seidman

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Stanford, California : , : Stanford University Press, , 2016

©2016

ISBN

0-8047-9962-8

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (368 pages)

Collana

Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture

Disciplina

809.88924

Soggetti

Jewish literature - 20th century - History and criticism

Jewish literature - 19th century - History and criticism

Jewish marriage customs and rites - History

Marriage customs and rites in literature

Love in literature

Sex in literature

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Plotting Jewish Marriage -- 1. A Sentimental Education -- 2. Matchmaking and Modernity -- 3. Pride and Pedigree -- 4. The Choreography of Courtship -- 5. In-Laws and Outlaws -- 6. Sex and Segregation -- Afterword: After Marriage -- Notes -- Index -- STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE

Sommario/riassunto

For nineteenth-century Eastern European Jews, modernization entailed the abandonment of arranged marriage in favor of the "love match." Romantic novels taught Jewish readers the rules of romance and the choreography of courtship. But because these new conceptions of romance were rooted in the Christian and chivalric traditions, the Jewish embrace of "the love religion" was always partial. In The Marriage Plot, Naomi Seidman considers the evolution of Jewish love and marriage though the literature that provided Jews with a sentimental education, highlighting a persistent ambivalence in the Jewish adoption of European romantic ideologies. Nineteenth-century



Hebrew and Yiddish literature tempered romantic love with the claims of family and community, and treated the rules of gender complementarity as comedic fodder. Twentieth-century Jewish writers turned back to tradition, finding pleasures in matchmaking, intergenerational ties, and sexual segregation. In the modern Jewish voices of Sigmund Freud, Erica Jong, Philip Roth, and Tony Kushner, the Jewish heretical challenge to the European romantic sublime has become the central sexual ideology of our time.