Civil Antisemitism, Modernism, and British Culture, 1902-1939

"This book focuses on "civil" antisemitism in twentieth-century Britain, a crucial and often critically neglected form of anti-Jewish rhetoric. Civil antisemitism is shaped by a tradition of British civility and etiquette, one that disdains blatant or "vulgar" expressions of bigotry. This preoccupation with courtesy and manners gives rise to techniques for cloaking the virulence of anti-Jewish hostilities--in short, hate rhetoric functioning as "civil" discourse. The book addresses a variety of manifestations of civil antisemitism, including parliamentary debates, ethnographic reportage, fascist fiction and propaganda, and ultimately modernist literature, particularly the work of Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, and Wyndham Lewis"--

Lara Trubowitz is the co-editor of Antisemitism and Philosemitism in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries: Representing Jews, Jewishness, and Modern Culture and co-editor and co-translator of Contemporary Italian Women Poets: A Bilingual Anthology. Her work on British and American modernism and Jewish Studies has appeared in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies and Twentieth-Century Literature.