Class Description
Two colorful late nineteenth-century novels, one English, one Danish, took on the debate over the position of Jews in modern, secular yet Christian-dominated society; both also focused on women’s social constraints. The better-known Daniel Deronda (1876) brings together a trapped upper-class woman, an illegitimate nobleman in search of his origins and vocation, and a scattered group of Jews living within the constraints of an anti-Semitic society. A generation later, the Nobel-Prize winner Henrik Pontoppidan published his Bildungsroman Lucky Per (1898). Again, the eponymous protagonist struggles against familial bonds to forge his destiny; as Per enters the cosmopolitan world of Copenhagen, he, too, encounters a group of Jews who become key to his development. Read together, the two novels present an exciting re-vision of both “the Jewish question” and of the struggle for women’s liberation, both of which, in mutated forms and new terms, occupy readers and writers to this day.
Natania Rosenfeld is a writer, independent scholar, and Professor Emerita of English at Knox College. She has published two books of poetry, a scholarly book, Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf (Princeton 2000), and an essay chapbook, She and I.
Materials List
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Required
- George Eliot, Daniel Deronda. Penguin, 1996. ISBN: 9780140434279
- Henrik Pontoppidan, Lucky Per. Everyman, 2019. ISBN: 9781101908099
First Reading
- Please read your way into Daniel Deronda, the first several chapters at least.
Cost and Registration
6 sessions, $247 ($222 for Newberry members, seniors, and students). Learn about becoming a member.
To register multiple people for this class, please go through the course calendar in Learning Stream, our registration platform. When you select the course and register, you’ll be prompted to add another registrant.
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