Matrilineal Dissent: Women Writers and Jewish American Literary History
Edited by Annie Atura Bushnell, Lori Harrison-Kahan, and Ashley Walters
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Bridging literary studies and cultural history, this edited volume examines Jewish women writers’ wide-ranging contributions to American literary culture from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. Matrilineal Dissent features innovative considerations of contemporary autofiction, graphic narratives, and novels by Mizrahi writers as well as middlebrow, Progressive Era, and second-wave feminist literature. Authors discussed herein—such as Roz Chast, Erica Jong, Annie Nathan Meyer, and Adrienne Rich—challenge monolithic representations of Jewishness and gender while imagining radical alternatives.
By tracing a matrilineal literary history, this book dissents from readers and critics who continue to describe women’s contributions as mere commentaries on and correctives to male-dominated canons. Simultaneously, this volume troubles the politics of inheritance, continuity, and lineage to underscore the ways that literary traditions—like Jewishness and gender—are mutually constitutive and continually in flux.
Collectively, contributors reframe Jewish American literary history through feminist approaches that have revolutionized the field, from intersectionality and the #MeToo movement to queer theory and disability studies. Examining both canonical and lesser-known texts, this collection asks: what happens to conventional understandings of Jewish American literature when we center women’s writing and acknowledge women as dominant players in Jewish cultural production?
"This absorbing collection shows how everything changes when Jewish women are given a place at the center, not the margins, of Jewish literary tradition. Writing itself becomes a radical act, opening new cultural perspectives. This is a book to be savored and admired; it will surely have wide influence in the field"
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--Joyce Antler
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"This inspiring and groundbreaking collection of essays transforms our understanding of American Jewish literature by tracing women's impact from the early part of the twentieth century to the present. Matrilineal Dissent reveals the crucial role women played in creating and sustaining a literary community. A literary feast, the volume highlights women's contributions to a wide range of genres from poetry, fiction, plays, autobiography, to graphic literature. Rather than focusing on the same few writers found in earlier collections and anthologies, here the focus is on authors we are less likely to know and yet should know. A must-read for anyone teaching Jewish American literature or who wants to know more about Jewish women's contributions to literary history"
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--Laura Leibman
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"Matrilineal Dissent is an extraordinarily smart collection, from the brilliant title all the way through the capacious essays. It will be an asset to scholars and lovers of all types of art alike"
--Jennifer Caplan
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