Back to the Future: Israeli Literature of the 1980s and 1990s
Author: Dvir Abramovich
Date Of Publication: Nov 2011
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-3338-7
Isbn: 1-4438-3338-X
This book provides a wide-ranging survey of a large number of Israeli novels and short stories written in the 1980s and 1990s and brings together a range of fresh critical perspectives that will benefit teachers and students of Hebrew literature and fans of literature in general.

This eye-opening and vibrant study furnishes the reader with insights about three dominant genres that emerged during these norm-defying decades and provides new understanding about how modern Israeli fiction evolved to be what it is today.

Abramovich provides the social and political background for the dramatic and broad transformations that took place in Israeli society during this period of transition¬¬— the Yom Kippur War, the election of the Likkud Party, The Lebanon War, the rise of postmodernism, the impact of feminism, the collapse of national consensus— and links those developments to the literary changes that seeped into the fabric of Israeli writing of that time.

The book deals with three pivotal areas that emerged and flowered in the 1980s and 1990s — Second Generation Holocaust literature, the Mizrachi novel, and detective fiction — and meticulously and comprehensively analyses the works’ subject-matters, ideas and aesthetic strategies. Extensively discussed and evaluated are the groundbreaking themes found in the stories of authors David Grossman, Sami Michael, Ronit Matalon, Savyon Liebrecht, Batya Gur, Eli Amir, Shulamit Lapid, Itamar Levy, Gila Almagor, Nava Semel, Dorit Rabinyan, Yitzhak Gormezano Goren, Dorit Peleg and Lily Peri Amitai.

From best-sellers to cult-classics, from the mainstream to the marginal, Back to the Future: Israeli Literature of the 1980s and 1990s is a significant and praiseworthy effort that celebrates the creative energy of Israeli culture and is sure to engage readers of many tastes.

Dr Dvir Abramovich is Director of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Jewish History and Culture and a Senior Lecturer in Hebrew and Jewish Studies. He was editor of the Australian Journal of Jewish Studies for eight years and President of the Australian Association of Jewish Studies from 2006 to 2010. He has published widely in the area of Israeli and Jewish literature and is co-editor of the book Testifying to the Holocaust (2008).

“In this ambitious new study, Dvir Abramovich takes for his subject hitherto marginalized but certainly not marginal works of recent Israeli fiction, and makes not only the works themselves but the cultural context in which they appeared interesting and accessible to the general reader. What is fascinating in his approach is how Abramovich traces the acceptance of such disparate ethnic and genre fictions into mainstream modern Hebrew literature back to historical events and social phenomena in the early years of Israeli statehood. . . . The aim of Abramovich’s excellent study is to highlight the social context as well as the artistic achievement of these voices of recent Israeli fiction, and to make those insights available to English-language readers.”

—Professor David Mesher, Department of English and comparative Literature, San José State University, USA

“Dvir Abramovich’s book is a lively and provocative study of Israeli-Hebrew literature in the 1980s and 1990s. . . . Selective and intelligent close-readings of several representative novels and stories from those two transitional decades display the kaleidoscopic differences in the ever-changing landscape of Israeli experiences and Abramovich masterfully negotiates the twists and turns of this multilane and layered highway that is modern Israel.”

—Professor Norman Simms, Department of Humanities and English at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand

“Dvir Abramovich’s new book provides the reader with in-depth insights into novels and short story collections penned by Hebrew writers during the 1980s and 1990s, opening a wide window into Israeli society and culture. . . . Abramovich succeeds in presenting the complexity and uniqueness of the new Israeli identity, or better, identities, which under the impact of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the ideological, socioeconomic, and cultural tensions between different sections of Israeli society, and the intense globalization, have undergone extensive deconstruction and reconstruction.”

—Professor Reuven Snir, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, University of Haifa, Israel

“Abramovich’s inspiring book makes a most important contribution to the exposure of contemporary Hebrew and Israeli literature to readers around the world . . . this is a welcome and wide ranging addition to the growing contemporary research on Hebrew literature written in the last decades.”

—Dr Adia Mendelson-Maoz, Head of Hebrew Literature Section, The Open University of Israel

Price Uk Gbp: 24.99
Price Us Usd: 39.99

Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)