16th century
A01=Janet Adelman
antisemitism
antonio
anxiety
Author_Janet Adelman
Category=DSBD
Category=DSG
character study
characters
christian
christianity
conversion
dependence
drama
english
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
familial terms
fiction
fictional
finances
guilt
humanity
jew
jewish
judaism
large loan
literary
literature
mercy
money
moneylender
nation
national
play
race
religion
religious representation
renaissance england
shylock
tension
the merchant of venice
william shakespeare
Product details
- ISBN 9780226006819
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 17 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 01 Apr 2008
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In "Blood Relations", Janet Adelman confronts her resistance to "The Merchant of Venice" as both a critic and a Jew. With her distinctive psychological acumen, she argues that Shakespeare's play frames the uneasy relationship between Christian and Jew specifically in familial terms in order to recapitulate the vexed familial relationship between Christianity and Judaism.Adelman locates the promise - or threat - of Jewish conversion as a particular site of tension in the play. Drawing on a variety of cultural materials, she demonstrates that, despite the triumph of its Christians, "The Merchant of Venice" reflects Christian anxiety and guilt about its simultaneous dependence on and disavowal of Judaism. In this startling psycho-theological analysis, both the insistence that Shylock's daughter Jessica remain racially bound to her father after her conversion and the depiction of Shylock as a bloody-minded monster are understood as antidotes to Christian uneasiness about a Judaism it can neither own nor disown.In taking seriously the religious discourse of "The Merchant of Venice", Adelman offers in "Blood Relations" an indispensable book on the play and on the fascinating question of Jews and Judaism in Renaissance England and beyond.
Janet Adelman is professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Twentieth-Century Interpretations of "King Lear", The Common Liar: An Essay on "Antony and Cleopatra", and Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare, "Hamlet" to "The Tempest."
