“Objects to Possess or Discard”

Although British literature in the interwar period is rife with stereotypical images of Jews, there was scant analysis of these images until after World War II. In the last twenty years, interest in marginalized “others” has coincided with the growth in scholarly studies of Jewish representation. Coupled with the compelling challenges of studying the Holocaust, it has become impossible to ignore representations of the Jew as a racialized literary subject. Recent studies have stressed connections between literary-historical contexts and prevailing cultural and political ideologies. This approach has shown that British literary images of the Jew are not equivalent to mythic, transhistorical anti-Semitic icons, but highly ambivalent, historically particular projections of complex attitudes towards British national and cultural identity. This research, however, focuses on male writers as representing the range of approaches to Jewish portraiture, and therefore does not address the relationship between a gendered and racialized narrative discourse. ¹