Abstract

The increasing visibility of a number of previously marginalized literary cultures is one of the most challenging developments in post-war American fiction. My dissertation deals with the novels of Bernard Malamud, a contemporary Jewish-American author, whose work is linked with this phenomenon as well as other significant trends in the recent literature of the United States. It is customary to think that ethnic authors write within the older realist or naturalist traditions. The new scholarship, however, claims that literary forms are not organically connected with ethnic groups. Jewish-American fiction offers much evidence that ethnicity and modernism form a false set of opposites.