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Borders of Intimacy in Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto
- Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 13, Number 1, January 2015
- pp. 91-110
- 10.1353/pan.2015.0003
- Article
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The article focuses on Zangwill’s unusual depictions of ghetto life in late-Victorian London. Zangwill portrays the ghetto as a space with a proclivity for holding its inhabitants not through economic, legal, or cultural pressures — all features of earlier Victorian writing about the ghetto — but through its affective power. It begins by situating Zangwill’s depictions of ghetto life amidst a longer trajectory of Victorian ghetto discourse. The essay moves on to explore the significance of Zangwill’s innovation in depicting ghetto life as a place that emerges from borders born of the interplay of intimate encounters, emotional knowledge, and embodied experience.