New Essays on Call It Sleep

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.

• Only collection specifically on Call it Sleep • Treats questions applicable to other fields/works - immigration, ethnicity, and cultural identity • Wide range of approaches - poetics, psychoanalytic, socio-historical, etc.

1. Introduction Hana Wirth-Nesher; 2. The many myths of Henry Roth Leslie Fielder; 3. Shifting urbanscape: Roth’s ‘private’ New York Mario Materassi; 4. The classic of disinheritance Ruth Wisse; 5. Henry Roth in Nighttown, or, containing Ulysses Brian McHale; 6. Roth’s Call it Sleep: modernism on the lower East Side Karen Lawrence; 7. ‘A world somewhere, somewhere else.’ Language, nostalgic mournfulness, and urban immigrant family romance in Call it Sleep Werner Sollors.