Bryan Cheyette
Biographic Data
| ID | 527994 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bryan Cheyette |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bryan |
| FAMILY NAME | Cheyette |
| SIGNATURE | CHEYETTE B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Reading |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0099-0190 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 24 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
What dialogue after Gaza
The fifth Gaza War this century is, at the time of writing, two years old with a massive loss of civilian life, including 20,000 children, and the obliteration of most of Gaza’s infrastructure. Specialists in genocide studies have described this war as a ‘genocide’. We can only hope that, by the time this Commentary is published, the cease fire will continue to hold followed by a comprehensive peace plan including Palestinian national rights. The…
Israel Zangwill: Past, Present and Future – An Introduction
Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) was the best-known Jewish anglophone writer and public intellectual during his lifetime. There has been a contemporary resurgence of interest in Zangwill's life and work in Britain, France, America and Israel, which will be discussed in the introduction and is illustrated by the articles in the special issue. I focus on the legacies of Zangwill both locally and globally. At the heart of the introduction is the way that…
Empowering the Literary Essay: Cynthia Ozick and the Search for Authority
The nonfiction of Cynthia Ozick includes many surrogate father figures, including Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling, and Elie Wiesel. These towering presences have been refashioned by Ozick in what she calls her “literary essays,” which she regards as a model of unrestrained creativity as championed by James. Ozick characterizes the literary essay as a gendered “secret self,” with a unique persuasive power, which she depicts as an extensi…
The extension of print culture and the mainstreaming of political antisemitism
Cheyette’s article will explore the many ways that popular culture in Britain, after the expansion of print culture in the 1890s, was influenced by the growth of political antisemitism and the resulting campaigns against Jewish citizenship in Western European nation-states. It will focus on four bestselling authors who instigated the paperback revolution—George Du Maurier, Hall Caine, Marie Corelli and Guy Thorne—and enjoyed total sales of severa…
Following Laura Marcus: From Autobiography to Testimony
The publication of Laura Marcus’s Auto/biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory, Practice (1994) coincided with a conference that I co-organised with her called ‘Modernity, Culture and “the Jew”’ (1994). We both expected the conference to be a modest event, but it turned out to be over-subscribed with many hundreds in attendance. In the light of our conference, my essay explores some of the reasons why the 1990s was thought of as an ‘age of tes…
Being Howard Jacobson: An Introduction
Howard Jacobson (1942–) has been the leading Jewish writer in Britain for nearly four decades. He remains at the height of his powers with the recent publication of his memoir, Mother’s Boy: A Writer’s Beginnings (2022) which is referred to throughout this introduction. I will return to Jacobson’s first novel, Coming from Behind (1983), to show how it relates to his ‘golden’ period which is the focus of the articles in this Special Issue. Novels …
On a Double Decker Omnibus to Golders Green
My abiding memory of Daniel Boyarin is sitting with him on the top deck of one of London’s famous red buses. We were traveling to Golders Green to eat a kosher meal after a conference in central London. It was the summer of 1994, at the height of Western optimism that the Oslo Accords would bring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to an end. This optimism, however naive, resulted in an extraordinary phenomenon. Closeted Jews in the British academy …
Northern Irish Writing After the Troubles: Intimacies, Affects, Pleasures
Winner of the British Association for Comtemporary Literary Stuides (BACLS) monograph prize The period since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 has seen a sustained decrease in violence and, at the same time, Northern Ireland has undergone a literary renaissance, with a fresh generation of writers exploring innovative literary forms. This open access book explores contemporary Northern Irish fiction and how the ‘post’-conflict period has led write…
The Ghetto: A Very Short Introduction
The Ghetto: A Very Short Introduction provides an overview of the history of the ghetto, focusing on specific times and places throughout history. Is the ghetto real or imagined? The word ‘ghetto’ would not have existed without 16th-century Italian economic interests, which led to the policy of placing the Jewish population in enclosed enclaves in around twenty-four Italian towns and cities. During the Holocaust, there were many hundreds of Nazi …
Zygmunt Bauman's window: From Jews to strangers and back again
Legislators and Interpreters (1987), Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) and Modernity and Ambivalence (1991) are the foundational trilogy on which Zygmunt Bauman developed much of his later work (from postmodernity to liquid modernity and from "the Jew" to "the Stranger"). This article is a unique engagement with the trilogy and with the metaphorical thinking which relates the trilogy to Bauman's later work in the first two decades of the twenty-…
David Mitchell's Post-Secular World: Buddhism, Belief and the Urgency of Compassion
Rose Harris-Birtill analyses the secular reworking of Buddhist religious influences across David Mitchell’s complete fictions, including his novels, short stories, and libretti, arguing that their shared ethical perspectives draw them into a continuous post-secular world, and introducing the Tibetan Buddhist mandala as a fittingly post-secular comparative model through which to analyse Mitchell’s fictional worldview. Harris-Birtill demonstrates t…
The Oxford History of the Novel in English
This book offers an account on the last eight decades of British and Irish prose fiction. It begins during the Second World War, when novel production fell by more than a third, and ends at a time when new technologies have made possible the publication of an unprecedented number of fiction titles and have changed completely the relationship between authors, publishers, the novel, and the reader. The chapters look at the impact of global warfare …
Jewish Fictions
This chapter looks at the characteristic genres in which British-Jewish writers have worked in the post-war period. Beginning with the Jewish writers of the 1950s and 1960s, the chapter considers the ways that they use the form of the realist novel to document, mythologize, or lament social mobility. The impact of the Holocaust was increasingly part of public discourse from the 1970s. Jewish writers turned to satirical or comic fiction to confron…
Enthusiast”: A Response to the Responses
A reply to the responses of Michael Rothberg, Steven Robbins, John McLeod, Vivek Freitas and Nils Roemer to "Against Supersessionist Thinking: Old and New, Jews and Postcolonialism, the Ghetto and Diaspora
Postcolonialism and the Study of Anti-Semitism
In recent years Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) has become a common point of reference for those within postcolonial studies—such as Paul Gilroy, Aamir Mufti, and Michael Rothberg—who wish to explore the historical intersections between racism, fascism, colonialism, and anti-Semitism. “Postcolonialism and the Study of Anti-Semitism” relates Arendt’s comparative thinking to other anticolonial theorists and camp survivors at t…
Spark, trauma and the novel
What is clear from even a cursory reading of Muriel Spark’s dazzling and cunning fictions is that she engages with a bewildering range of literary modes but only in so far as they can be subsumed by her singular vision. Spark’s quirky and playful voice refuses to be contained by any one doctrine or identity. First among the philosophies and identities which she finds absurd is that of the conventional realist novel with its humanist assumptions t…
Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History
In this fascinating and erudite book, Bryan Cheyette throws new light on a wide range of modern and contemporary writers—some at the heart of the canon, others more marginal—to explore the power and limitations of the diasporic imagination after the Second World War. Moving from early responses to the death camps and decolonization, through internationally prominent literature after the Second World War, the book culminates in fresh engagements w…
Writing After Postcolonialism: Francophone North African Literature in Transition
‘Focusing on francophone writing from North Africa as it has developed since the 1980s, Writing After Postcolonialism explores the extent to which the notion of ‘postcolonialism’ is still resonant for literary writers a generation or more after independence, and examines the troubled status of literature in society and politics during this period. Whilst analysing the ways in which writers from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia have reacted to politic…
Against Supersessionist Thinking: Old and New, Jews and Postcolonialism, the Ghetto and Diaspora
This essay focuses on the liberatory possibilities and political and disciplinary difficulties of bringing together Jewish and postcolonial studies. It begins and ends with Adorno’s critique of “actionism” in order to see what is lost when the clarity and certainty of political action is privileged over scholarly nuance and complexity (“praxis” over “theory”). This loss is surveyed through a set of related binaries (supersessionism, foundationali…
The Future of Literary Thinking
All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility
Decolonizing Trauma Studies Round-Table Discussion
This round-table, which featured literary critics Professor Stef Craps, Professor Bryan Cheyette and Dr. Alan Gibbs, was recorded as part of the “Decolonizing Trauma Studies” symposium organized by Dr. Sonya Andermahr and Dr. Larissa Allwork at The School of The Arts, The University of Northampton (15 May 2015). Convened a week after the University of Zaragoza’s “Memory Frictions” conference, where Cheyette, Gibbs, Andermahr and Allwork gave pape…
English anti-Semitism: A Counter-Narrative
The dignity of Janina Bauman: A personal reflection
Jewish/Postcolonial Diasporas: On Being Ill-disciplined
Jewish/Postcolonial Diasporas: On Being Ill-disciplined." , 24(1), pp. 1–2 Notes 1. Freud, Auerbach and Adorno are at the heart of Freud and the Non-European (2003), Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004) and On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain ( Citation2006 ). For a more detailed discussion of Said's use of these figures see my essay, 'Edward Said: The Last Jewish Intellectual' in a forthcoming collection on Said co-edited b…
Fanon et Sartre: Noirs et Juifs
Against Supersessionist Thinking: Old and New, Jews and Postcolonialism, the Ghetto and Diaspora
This essay focuses on the liberatory possibilities and political and disciplinary difficulties of bringing together Jewish and postcolonial studies. It begins and ends with Adorno’s critique of “actionism” in order to see what is lost when the clarity and certainty of political action is privileged over scholarly nuance and complexity (“praxis” over “theory”). This loss is surveyed through a set of related binaries (supersessionism, foundationali…
Northern Irish Writing After the Troubles: Intimacies, Affects, Pleasures
Winner of the British Association for Comtemporary Literary Stuides (BACLS) monograph prize The period since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 has seen a sustained decrease in violence and, at the same time, Northern Ireland has undergone a literary renaissance, with a fresh generation of writers exploring innovative literary forms. This open access book explores contemporary Northern Irish fiction and how the ‘post’-conflict period has led write…
The Future of Literary Thinking
All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility
Jews and Jewishness in the writings of George Eliot and Frantz Fanon1
English anti-Semitism: A Counter-Narrative
Jewish/Postcolonial Diasporas: On Being Ill-disciplined
Jewish/Postcolonial Diasporas: On Being Ill-disciplined." , 24(1), pp. 1–2 Notes 1. Freud, Auerbach and Adorno are at the heart of Freud and the Non-European (2003), Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004) and On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain ( Citation2006 ). For a more detailed discussion of Said's use of these figures see my essay, 'Edward Said: The Last Jewish Intellectual' in a forthcoming collection on Said co-edited b…
On Being a Jewish Critic
The second image is taken from Kafka's Metamorphosis, when the metamorphosed Gregor-a giant insect-inadvertently begins to cross the boundary from his bedroom into the living room as he becomes transfixed by his sister playing the violin. Was he an animal, that music had such an effect on him? Gregor wonders. In a letter to Max Brod, Kafka famously described his generation of Germanized Jews as four-legged animals: [T] heir hind legs were still m…
Introduction: Liberalism and Anti-semitism
Hilaire belloc and the ‘Marconi scandal’ 1900–1914: A reassessment of the interactionist model of racial hatred
This study begins by examining, in some detail, the assumptions which lie behind an ‘interactionist’ model of racial hatred. To date, this theory — with specific regard to recent histories of anti‐Semitism and Fascism in Britain — has been largely unchallenged as a self‐proclaimed ‘revisionist’ orthodoxy. The second half of this paper takes the ‘Marconi Scandal’ (1911–1914), which has often been read in ‘interactionist’ terms, and offers an alter…
H. G. Wells and the Jews: Antisemitism, socialism and English culture
In H. G. Wells's vision of a Utopian world state, a separate Jewish culture represented a corrupt and reactionary impediment to progress and order. Wells stopped short of advocating annihilation but he blamed the existence of antisemitism on the Jew's failure to assimilate to the universalist mainstream
H. G. Wells and the Jews: Antisemitism, socialism and English culture
In H. G. Wells's vision of a Utopian world state, a separate Jewish culture represented a corrupt and reactionary impediment to progress and order. Wells stopped short of advocating annihilation but he blamed the existence of antisemitism on the Jew's failure to assimilate to the universalist mainstream
Hilaire belloc and the ‘Marconi scandal’ 1900–1914: A reassessment of the interactionist model of racial hatred
This study begins by examining, in some detail, the assumptions which lie behind an ‘interactionist’ model of racial hatred. To date, this theory — with specific regard to recent histories of anti‐Semitism and Fascism in Britain — has been largely unchallenged as a self‐proclaimed ‘revisionist’ orthodoxy. The second half of this paper takes the ‘Marconi Scandal’ (1911–1914), which has often been read in ‘interactionist’ terms, and offers an alter…
Jews and Jewishness in the writings of George Eliot and Frantz Fanon1
Constructions of 'The Jew' in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945
Between ‘Race’ and Culture: Representations of ‘the Jew’ in English and American Literature
This collection of essays examines various representations of “the Jew” in British and American literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It analyzes in detail the literary racism and antisemitism of some of the most important and influential writers of this period, including Dickens, Trollope, James, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Woolf, and Orwell, as well as such marginal figures as Dorothy Richardson, Stevie Smith, and Michael Gold. The con…
Modernity, Culture and 'the Jew'
Preface by Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus. Foreword by Homi Bhabha. 1. Some Methodological Anxieties: Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus. Part 1. Gender, Psychoanalysis, and History. 2. Historicizing Weininger: The Nineteenth--Century German Image of Feminized Jew: Ritchie Robertson. 3. My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schrebera s Secret History of Modernity: Eric Santner. 4. Goyim Naches, or, Modernity and Manliness of Mentsh: Daniel Boyarin. P…
Between Repulsion and Attraction: George Steiner's Post-Holocaust Fiction
here is something singularly paradoxical about George Steiner. An avowed elitist, he is also a tireless popularizer whose literary journalism, in both Great Britain and the United States, includes hundreds of uncollected pieces in the New Yorker, TLS, and London Sunday Times.' Steiner, the doyen of ineffability and seeker after Real Presences, beyond the word, never stops speaking or writing. From his essay Postscript (1966) onward he tells us no…
Introduction: Liberalism and Anti-semitism
On Being a Jewish Critic
The second image is taken from Kafka's Metamorphosis, when the metamorphosed Gregor-a giant insect-inadvertently begins to cross the boundary from his bedroom into the living room as he becomes transfixed by his sister playing the violin. Was he an animal, that music had such an effect on him? Gregor wonders. In a letter to Max Brod, Kafka famously described his generation of Germanized Jews as four-legged animals: [T] heir hind legs were still m…
Frantz Fanon and Jean‐Paul Sartre: Blacks and Jews
Fanon et Sartre: Noirs et Juifs
Jewish/Postcolonial Diasporas: On Being Ill-disciplined
Jewish/Postcolonial Diasporas: On Being Ill-disciplined." , 24(1), pp. 1–2 Notes 1. Freud, Auerbach and Adorno are at the heart of Freud and the Non-European (2003), Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004) and On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain ( Citation2006 ). For a more detailed discussion of Said's use of these figures see my essay, 'Edward Said: The Last Jewish Intellectual' in a forthcoming collection on Said co-edited b…
English anti-Semitism: A Counter-Narrative
The dignity of Janina Bauman: A personal reflection
Decolonizing Trauma Studies Round-Table Discussion
This round-table, which featured literary critics Professor Stef Craps, Professor Bryan Cheyette and Dr. Alan Gibbs, was recorded as part of the “Decolonizing Trauma Studies” symposium organized by Dr. Sonya Andermahr and Dr. Larissa Allwork at The School of The Arts, The University of Northampton (15 May 2015). Convened a week after the University of Zaragoza’s “Memory Frictions” conference, where Cheyette, Gibbs, Andermahr and Allwork gave pape…
The Future of Literary Thinking
All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility
Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History
In this fascinating and erudite book, Bryan Cheyette throws new light on a wide range of modern and contemporary writers—some at the heart of the canon, others more marginal—to explore the power and limitations of the diasporic imagination after the Second World War. Moving from early responses to the death camps and decolonization, through internationally prominent literature after the Second World War, the book culminates in fresh engagements w…
Writing After Postcolonialism: Francophone North African Literature in Transition
‘Focusing on francophone writing from North Africa as it has developed since the 1980s, Writing After Postcolonialism explores the extent to which the notion of ‘postcolonialism’ is still resonant for literary writers a generation or more after independence, and examines the troubled status of literature in society and politics during this period. Whilst analysing the ways in which writers from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia have reacted to politic…
Against Supersessionist Thinking: Old and New, Jews and Postcolonialism, the Ghetto and Diaspora
This essay focuses on the liberatory possibilities and political and disciplinary difficulties of bringing together Jewish and postcolonial studies. It begins and ends with Adorno’s critique of “actionism” in order to see what is lost when the clarity and certainty of political action is privileged over scholarly nuance and complexity (“praxis” over “theory”). This loss is surveyed through a set of related binaries (supersessionism, foundationali…
The Oxford History of the Novel in English
This book offers an account on the last eight decades of British and Irish prose fiction. It begins during the Second World War, when novel production fell by more than a third, and ends at a time when new technologies have made possible the publication of an unprecedented number of fiction titles and have changed completely the relationship between authors, publishers, the novel, and the reader. The chapters look at the impact of global warfare …
Jewish Fictions
This chapter looks at the characteristic genres in which British-Jewish writers have worked in the post-war period. Beginning with the Jewish writers of the 1950s and 1960s, the chapter considers the ways that they use the form of the realist novel to document, mythologize, or lament social mobility. The impact of the Holocaust was increasingly part of public discourse from the 1970s. Jewish writers turned to satirical or comic fiction to confron…
Enthusiast”: A Response to the Responses
A reply to the responses of Michael Rothberg, Steven Robbins, John McLeod, Vivek Freitas and Nils Roemer to "Against Supersessionist Thinking: Old and New, Jews and Postcolonialism, the Ghetto and Diaspora
Postcolonialism and the Study of Anti-Semitism
In recent years Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) has become a common point of reference for those within postcolonial studies—such as Paul Gilroy, Aamir Mufti, and Michael Rothberg—who wish to explore the historical intersections between racism, fascism, colonialism, and anti-Semitism. “Postcolonialism and the Study of Anti-Semitism” relates Arendt’s comparative thinking to other anticolonial theorists and camp survivors at t…
Spark, trauma and the novel
What is clear from even a cursory reading of Muriel Spark’s dazzling and cunning fictions is that she engages with a bewildering range of literary modes but only in so far as they can be subsumed by her singular vision. Spark’s quirky and playful voice refuses to be contained by any one doctrine or identity. First among the philosophies and identities which she finds absurd is that of the conventional realist novel with its humanist assumptions t…
David Mitchell's Post-Secular World: Buddhism, Belief and the Urgency of Compassion
Rose Harris-Birtill analyses the secular reworking of Buddhist religious influences across David Mitchell’s complete fictions, including his novels, short stories, and libretti, arguing that their shared ethical perspectives draw them into a continuous post-secular world, and introducing the Tibetan Buddhist mandala as a fittingly post-secular comparative model through which to analyse Mitchell’s fictional worldview. Harris-Birtill demonstrates t…
Philosophy (23 works) · History (21 works) · Art (20 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Literature (16 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (14 works) · Theology (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Political science (13 works)