Ghetto Walls: The Intercultural Narrative Strategies of Late Victorian Anglo-Jewish Writers

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My doctoral dissertation will investigate the intercultural narrative strategies of Anglo-Jewish writers during the late 1880s and early 1890s. My proposal is concerned with how perspective is used as a tool to discover and express one's culture and with how writers negotiate the borders between intracultural and intercultural spaces. Its central focus will be the prose fiction of Israel Zangwill and Amy Levy and it will approach their works in three ways. First, by viewing their novels as case studies that complement and problematise a recent critical interest in the moral orientation of late Victorian narrative techniques. Then, through a comparison with George Eliot and James Joyce, it will consider how the narratorial positioning necessary for intercultural communication is affected by urban mobility. Finally, it will examine the material and reception contexts of Levy's and Zangwill's prose non-fiction in order to ascertain the particular navigation of intraand inter-communal borders at work in their longer, fictional writings. This project aims to stage an encounter between, and therefore contribute to, multiple critical fields. Urban mobility and narratological experimentation provide keys to understanding how Jewishness has been articulated historically. Inversely, Jewish examples complicate the critical lenses used to read them, for example by allowing for a study that assesses the future of and limits to narrative theory.