This book consists of ten essays that examine the ways in which language has been used to evoke what Lawrence L. Langer calls the ‘deathscape’ and the ‘hopescape’ of the Holocaust. The chapters in this collection probe the diverse impacts that site visits, memoirs, survivor testimonies, psychological studies, literature and art have on our response to the atrocities committed by the Germans during World War II. Langer also considers the misunderstandings caused by erroneous, embellished and sentimental accounts of the catastrophe, and explores some reasons why they continue to enter public and printed discourse with such ease.

"Sources for Studying the Holocaust provides a pathway for readers to engage with questions about what sources can be used to study the Holocaust. For many historians the challenge has been how to rescue the story from oblivion when oft-used sources for other periods of history introduce even more issues around authenticity and reliability. What can be learned of what transpired in villages and towns numbering several thousand people, when all its Jewish inhabitants were totally obliterated through Nazi action? Who can furnish eyewitness testimony, if all the eyewitnesses were killed? How does one examine written records preserving knowledge of facts or events, where none were kept or survived the onslaught? And what weight do we put upon such resources which did manage to endure the destruction wrought by the Holocaust? Each chapter looks at one of a diverse range of source material from which scholars have rescued the history, including survivor testimony, diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, photographs, trial documents, artefacts, digital resources, memorials, films, literature and art. Each chapter shows how different types of records can be utilized as accurate sources for the writing of Holocaust history. Collectively, they highlight the ways in which all material, even the most fragmentary, can be employed to recreate a reliable record of what happened during the Holocaust and show how all sources considered can be employed to find meaning and understanding by exploring a range of sources deeply. This book is a unique analysis of the types of sources that can be used to access the history of Holocaust. It will be of invaluable interest to readers, students and researchers of the Holocaust"--

This book discusses the interaction between history, rabbinic literature and feminist studies. Recent approaches to rabbinic literature have overturned the traditional view of these writings and new literary methods were suggested, mostly denying them all historical value. But rabbinic literature constitutes the main source for the lives of Jews in Palestine and Babylonia during the late Roman period, and thus should not be totally rejected. This study suggests a new post-literary approach, i.e. it discusses the residue of the texts after these have been analyzed and dissected by literary critics. But mainly this is a book about women's history, adopting many assumptions of feminist criticism about the androcentric nature of all ancient texts, and approaches them with due suspicion. The Rabbis treated women differently from the way they treated men. This resulted in the former's marginalization and manipulation by the texts. On the other hand, however, it created an ironic situation whereby principles useful for the recovery of historical information on women, are useless when applied to men. This study describes such principles and demonstrates them with the help of many examples.

The twelve articles in this book (five of them by editor Jacob Neusner) explore the background developments and motivating forces for what Neusner calls the "re-invention" of history in the fourth and fifth centuries CE. The Christianization of the Roman empire under Constantine is seen as the impetus for reexamination within both Christianity and Judaism of their historical foundations. History then became a "mode of religious-theological discourse" for the respective communities of faith. The other contributors to the volume are: Burton Mack, Glenn Chestnut, Arnaldo Momigliano, Nahum Glatzer, and William Scott Green.

Ivan Jablonka's History Is a Contemporary Literature offers highly innovative perspectives on the writing of history, the relationship between literature and the social sciences, and the way that both social-scientific inquiry and literary explorations contribute to our understanding of the world. Jablonka argues that the act and art of writing, far from being an afterthought in the social sciences, should play a vital role in the production of knowledge in all stages of the researcher's work and embody or even constitute the understanding obtained. History (along with sociology and anthropology) can, he contends, achieve both greater rigor and wider audiences by creating a literary experience through a broad spectrum of narrative modes. Challenging scholars to adopt investigative, testimonial, and other experimental writing techniques as a way of creating and sharing knowledge, Jablonka envisions a social science literature that will inspire readers to become actively engaged in understanding their own pasts and to relate their histories to the present day. Lamenting the specialization that has isolated the academy from the rest of society, History Is a Contemporary Literature aims to bring imagination and audacity into the practice of scholarship, drawing on the techniques of literature to strengthen the methods of the social sciences.

This synthetic treatment of Josephus and his times has two aims. The first is to establish Josephus' attitudes to the various Judaean aristocratic groups of the first century - priests, descendants of Herod, certain sectarians - and how these attitudes changed. The second aim is more speculative: to connect these changes with actual changes in Judaean politics and society in the c. 30 years of Josephus' literary activity, a critical period of transformation following the destruction of Jerusalem. The first chapter examines Josephus' life from his detection to Vespasian, and suggests that Josephus always retained an interest in current public affairs, particularly those of Judaea. Chapters 2-4 discuss the changes of attitude within the Josephan corpus and place them in the context of the evidence of the coins, inscriptions, Rabbinic literature and pagan historians. It is argued that these changes allow us to trace the decline of the pre-66 aristocracy groups after 70. Chapter 5 argues that there arose a new aristocracy in the 80s and 90s, a rise which left its mark in Josephus' later work.

Using pagan prose fiction produced in Greek and Latin during the early Christian era, Bowersock investigates the complex relationship among perceived and presented 'historical' and 'fictional' truths. Bowersock's superb lecturing style is successfully transferred into writing with force and eloquence, as he weaves accounts from a wide range of sources into his text, illuminating social attitudes of the period and persuasively arguing that fiction of the period was influenced by the emerging Christian Gospel narratives. In the second half of the first century emerges a new kind of fiction including outlandish tales of travel, romance and comic novels. Bowersock concentrates on secular literature, illuminating not only its literary motifs, but also reconstructing the societal context as one engrossed in fabrications and all kinds of revisions or rewriting. Using these less familiar materials as his points of reference, he reads into familiar Christian material, making linkages and casting new light on familiar subjects, as well as providing some provocative interpretations of familiar Christian texts. Bowersock uses close historical and literary analyses of specific passages of works, and pays attention to larger and more general issues and questions around the relationship between fiction and history and how we read them. This book will be of basic intellectual concern to all raised in the environment of Christian belief.

Eminent Anglo-Saxonist Nicholas Howe explores how the English, in the centuries before the Norman Conquest, located themselves both literally and imaginatively in the world. His elegantly written study focuses on Anglo-Saxon representations of place as revealed in a wide variety of texts in Latin and Old English, as well as in diagrams of holy sites and a single map of the known world found in British Library, Cotton Tiberius B v. The scholar's investigations are supplemented and aided by insights gleaned from his many trips to physical sites. The Anglo-Saxons possessed a remarkable body of geographical knowledge in written rather than cartographic form, Howe demonstrates. To understand fully their cultural geography, he considers Anglo-Saxon writings about the places they actually inhabited and those they imagined. He finds in Anglo-Saxon geographic images a persistent sense of being far from the center of the world, and he discusses how these migratory peoples narrowed that distance and developed ways to define themselves.

The essays in this collection investigate the ways in which the past was exploited to meet the concerns of the present in early modern England. The understanding of the past in this period was characterized by a deepening and more fully articulated conception of time and history, with its roots in impassioned religious and political controversies. The discourses that arose from this dialogue informed and drew together a daunting range of genres and activities: prose accounts, polemical tracts, poems, plays, romances, secret histories, novels. Although many of these genres are no longer recognized as history, early modern writers and readers treated them as such. In assessing the uses of the past, therefore, these essays consider “literary” and “factual” writings side by side, avoiding traditional chronological and disciplinary divisions and the artificial separation of secular from ecclesiastical history. Cumulatively, they supply the context and provide a vast array of evidence for the way in which the deployment of history for political, religious, moral, aesthetic, or commercial purposes shifted between the mid-sixteenth century and the late eighteenth. Contributors include Ian W. Archer, Eve Tavor Bannet, David Cressy, Richard Dutton, Martin Dzelzainis, Felicity Heal, Christopher Highley, John N. King, Mark Knights, Karen O’Brien, Paul Seaward, John Spurr, Andrew Starkie, Arthur H. Williamson, David Womersley, Daniel R. Woolf, and Blair Worden. Paulina Kewes is a fellow and tutor in English literature at Jesus College, Oxford, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her publications include Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660–1710 (1998), and a number of articles on Renaissance, Restoration, and eighteenth-century drama and politics. She has also edited a volume of essays, Plagiarism in Early Modern England (2003), and is completing a book on the staging of history in Elizabethan England.

"Professor Waldman challenges the prevailing practice in Islamicate historiography by undertaking a multifaceted analysis of a single text--a major historical narrative and a pivotal work in the history of new Persian language and literature since the tenth century: the Ghaznavid period's Ta'rīkh-i Bayhaqī ... Dr. Waldman is able to identify a wide range of phenomena that suggest the close relationship between historical narratives like the one under study and other literary narratives. She demonstrates that theories of narrative developed by literary critics can and should be expanded to account for historical narrative, and explores the potential utility of one critical approach--speech act theory ... Dr. Waldman calls for a dramatic reversal in the traditional ways in which historical narratives have been used by historians--not in order to curtail their function, as some critics would do, to merely confirming what hard evidence suggests--but rather so as to allow them to provide their abundant and unique information about hitherto unappreciated dimensions in the history of language, communication, ideas, and culture"--From book jacket.

At head of title: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Institute of Advanced Studies.

"Griselda Pollock reintroduces an important feminist forerunner in this new, full-colour setting of Helen Rosenau's 1944 book Woman in Art. Helen Rosenau (1900-1984) was part of the influential migration of European Jewish intellectuals who fled to Britain and the United States during the 1930s, bringing with them exciting innovations in art history's methods. Only Rosenau, however, centred gender in her analysis. The result--her book Woman in Art: From Type to Personality--is a feminist art-historical project, as relevant today as when it was first published in 1944, in which Rosenau drew on contemporary discussions of gender in anthropology, philosophy, sociology, law, theology, history, and literature. In this new volume, ahead of the eightieth anniversary of its original publication, Rosenau's erudite and accessible text is prefaced with a personal memoir by Adrian Rifkin, who was once her student, new research into the refugee experience by Rachel Dickson, and a portrait of Rosenau as feminist intellectual by Griselda Pollock. In conversation with this new setting of the original text, richly illustrated with colour images, Pollock offers eye-opening new readings of key aspects of Rosenau's methods, concepts, arguments, and interpretations of famous artworks, establishing the place of Rosenau's "little book of 1944" in the historiographies of both feminist thought and cutting-edge art history across two centuries."-- Source other than Library of Congress.