Literary Representations of the Palestine/Israel Conflict After the Second Intifada

Ned Curthoys is Senior Lecturer in English and Literary Studies at the University of Western Australia and researches in areas including Jewish and Holocaust studies, representations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and narrative theory. His monograph The Legacy of Liberal Judaism: Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt's Hidden Conversation (2013, paperback 2016) was published by Berghahn books. His work has appeared in Textual Practice, Comparative Literature Studies, Theory and Event, New Formations, Children's Literature in Education, and College Literature (forthcoming). He is working on his second book examining the Bildungsroman as a shaping influence on historical fiction and film about the Second World War.

Studies literary representations of Israel and Palestine that challenge mainstream political and historical discourses This edited collection brings together discussions of literary works from Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the Palestinian and Jewish Diasporas, as well as from authors not directly involved who are seeking to unpack the conflict's complexities for a wider audience. It offers new perspectives into how the Palestine/Israel conflict is, and can be, represented after the Second Palestinian Intifada, an epochal event for both Israelis and Palestinians. The collection foregrounds the thematic concerns that link literary engagements with Palestine/Israel across the globe but also examines the role that aesthetic representation plays in framing the conflict and its power dynamics. As such, the contributors address how emergent forms of writing and representation illuminate but also re-describe conflict in the context of Israel and Palestine and how depicting this conflict has had reverberations for representing conflict and conflict zones more widely. Key Features and Benefits - Examines a range of emergent and existing literary forms that represent the Palestine/Israel conflict to a global audience. - Argues that emergent literary forms have adapted to imperatives for political witnessing, while offering scope for the re-fashioning of identity beyond restrictive nationalisms. - Discusses diverse literary works from Israel, the Palestinian Occupied Territories including Gaza, as well as Belgium, Canada, Egypt, France, Lebanon, the United Kingdom and the United States. - Brings together a geographically diverse team of literary and cultural studies researchers with depth of expertise in Palestine/Israel and Middle Eastern studies. Ned Curthoys is Senior Lecturer in English and Literary Studies at the University of Western Australia. Isabelle Hesse is Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Sydney.