Edwardian Popular Culture and Everyday Antisemitism

Edwardian Popular Culture and Everyday Antisemitism
The decline of the three-volume “library” edition of the novel led to the growth of popular fiction from the 1890s onwards. My talk will explore the expansion of print culture which facilitated the mass circulation of political antisemitism in Britain before the First World War. The same popular culture promoted equally racialized but philosemitic images of “the Jew.” Issues which I will raise include the tension between “race” and culture, the growth of Jewish conspiracy theories before the Protocols, and the connection between a new mass-produced medium and everyday antisemitism.

Bryan Cheyette is Professor Emeritus of Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Reading, and a Research Fellow at the University of Southampton. He has published eleven books which include Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature in Society (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Diasporas of the Mind, (Yale University Press, 2014), and, most recently, The Ghetto: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2020). A Series Editor for Bloomsbury (New Horizons in Contemporary Writing), he is currently working on a comparative account of testimony from slave narratives to refugee stories.

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