New Essays on Call It Sleep

A 1996 collection of critical essays on Henry Roth's Call It Sleep.

Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, has been finally hailed as one of the finest Jewish-American modernist novels. The introduction and essays locate the novel in its cultural context and in terms of contemporary debates about ethnic literature, minority writing, modernism, and canonisation.Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, praised when it first appeared in the 1930s, neglected for decades and reissued to wide acclaim in the 1960s, has been hailed, finally, as the finest Jewish-American novel of the first half of the century and one of the richest modernist novels to appear in America. The introduction by Hana Wirth-Nesher locates the novel in its cultural context and in terms of contemporary debates about ethnic literature, minority writing, and the problem of representativeness. Thus, the volume sets out to consider Roth's hybrid status - as an American writer, a Jewish writer, and a European modernist.