New Essays on Call It Sleep [Hardcover]

A 1996 collection of critical essays on Henry Roth's Call It Sleep.This volume sets out to consider Roth's hybrid status--as an American writer, a Jewish writer, and a European modernist. The introduction and essays locate the novel in its cultural context and in terms of contemporary debates about ethnic literature, minority writing, modernism and canonization.This volume sets out to consider Roth's hybrid status--as an American writer, a Jewish writer, and a European modernist. The introduction and essays locate the novel in its cultural context and in terms of contemporary debates about ethnic literature, minority writing, modernism and canonization.Henry Roth's Call it Sleep, praised when it first appeared in the 1930s, neglected for decades, and reissued to wide acclaim in the 1960s, has been finally hailed as the finest Jewish-American novel of the first half of the century and one of the richest modernist novels to appear in America. The introduction and essays locate the novel in its cultural context and in terms of contemporary debates about ethnic literature, minority writing, modernism and canonization. Thus the volume sets out to consider Roth's hybrid status--as an American writer, a Jewish writer, and a European modernist.1. Introduction Hana Wirth-Nesher; 2. The many myths of Henry Roth Leslie Fielder; 3. Shifting urbanscape: Roth's 'private' New York Mario Materassi; 4. The classic of disinheritance Ruth Wisse; 5. Henry Roth in Nighttown, or, containing Ulysses Brian McHale; 6. Roth's Call It Sleep: modernism on the lower East Side Karen Lawrence; 7. 'A world somewhere, somewhere else.' Language, nostalgic mournfulness, and urban immigrant family romance in Call It Sleep Werner Sollors. ...in original and exciting ways push into new territory. It is to be read carefully and treasured. Jules Chametzky, Shofar