A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History [Hardcover]

2019ChoiceOutstanding Academic Title

Jewish writers have long had a sense of place in the United States, and interpretations of American geography have appeared in Jewish American literature from the colonial era forward. But troublingly, scholarship on Jewish American literary history often limits itself to an immigrant model, situating the Jewish American literary canon firmly and inescapably among the immigrant authors and early environments of the early twentieth century. InA Hundred Acres of America, Michael Hoberman combines literary history and geography to restore Jewish American writers to their roles as critical members of the American literary landscape from the 1850s to the present, and to argue that Jewish history, American literary history, and the inhabitation of American geography are, and always have been, contiguous entities.  

Michael Hoberman combines literary history and geography to restore Jewish American writers to their roles as critical members of the American literary landscape from the 1850s to the present, and to argue that Jewish history, American literary history, and the inhabitation of American geography are, and always have been, contiguous entities. 

MICHAEL HOBERMAN is a professor of English studies at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. He is the author of several books, includingNew Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America.

"Michael Hoberman has opened up freshly the pathway in Jewish American writings about the sense of place, how Jewish life in America has come to be and feel at home."

"At once critically imaginative and rigorously methodological,A Hundred Acres of Americais a genuinely exciting, pathbreaking work of breathtaking historical, geographical, and cultural scope."

"A Hundred Acres is a worthy and lucid genealogy of the under-explored JewlcR