{"product_id":"9780472121731","title":"Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque","description":"It was only when Jewish writers gave up on the lofty Enlightenment ideals of progress and improvement that the Yiddish novel could decisively enter modernity. Animating their fictions were a set of unheroic heroes who struck a precarious balance between sanguinity and irony that author Miriam Udel captures through the phrase “never better.” With this rhetorical homage toward the double-voiced utterances of Sholem Aleichem, Udel gestures at these characters’ insouciant proclamation that things had never been better, and their rueful, even despairing admission that things would probably \u003ci\u003enever\u003c\/i\u003e get better.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e The characters defined by this dual consciousness constitute a new kind of protagonist: a distinctively Jewish scapegrace whom Udel denominates the \u003ci\u003epolit\u003c\/i\u003e or refugee. Cousin to the Golden Age Spanish \u003ci\u003epícaro\u003c\/i\u003e, the \u003ci\u003epolit\u003c\/i\u003e is a socially marginal figure who narrates his own story in discrete episodes, as if stringing beads on a narrative necklace. A deeply unsettled figure, the \u003ci\u003epolit\u003c\/i\u003e is allergic to sentimentality and even routine domesticity. His sequential misadventures point the way toward the heart of the picaresque, which Jewish authors refashion as a vehicle for modernism—not only in Yiddish, but also in German, Russian, English and Hebrew. Udel draws out the contours of the new Jewish picaresque by contrasting it against the nineteenth-century genre of progress epitomized by the \u003ci\u003eBildungsroman\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e While this book is grounded in modern Jewish literature, its implications stretch toward genre studies in connection with modernist fiction more generally. Udel lays out for a diverse readership concepts in the history and theory of the novel while also explicating the relevant particularities of Jewish literary culture. In addressing the literary stylistics of a “minor” modernism, this study illuminates how the adoption of a picaresque sensibility allowed minority authors to write simultaneously \u003ci\u003ewithin\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eagainst\u003c\/i\u003e the literary traditions of Europe.","brand":"University of Michigan Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47072613073136,"sku":"9780472121731","price":23.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780472121731_p0.jpg?v=1763707808","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780472121731","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}