Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

2003

Thesis Director

Richard Sylvia

Abstract

Dismissed by contemporary critics as a second-rate writer, Benjamin Disraeli has been undervalued for over a hundred and fifty years. Writing in 1979, D.R. Schwarz rued that no recent full-length study of his novels had been undertaken, while other, even more minor novelists have been regularly exhumed. A substantial reassessment may be underway, as Paul Smith notes, particularly in the area of Disraeli's Jewishness. Bernard Glassman's volume, Benjamin Disraeli: The Fabricated Jew in Myth and Memory (2003), and Disraeli's Jewishness (2002), by Todd Endelman and Tony Kushner, attest to this new interest. A recent general study, Disraeli (2000), by Edgar Feuchtwanger, and a history of the political novel, The Centre of Things: Political Fiction in Britain from Disraeli to the Present (1991), by Christopher Harvie, have also been published. Except for the latter, which retains a barbed view of Disraeli's motives, the censorious tone of much earlier scholarship has disappeared in favor of interest in Disraeli's ideas. Smith's own book, A Brief Life (1996), promises such a re-interpretation.

In the throes of industrialization, capitalism, and Utilitarianism, the Victorian era looked askance at vestiges of romanticism which lingered in its midst. Alienated from this .. prevailing ethos" (Feuchtwanger ix), undoubtedly tainted as well by anti-Semitism, Disraeli was subsequently given short shrift. Labeled as an overcharged romantic, with good reason based on his first six novels, critics failed to notice what of antithesis to the romantic existed in his political trilogy. Though later scholars note his esoteric conception of the political and social scene, it has generally been with scorn rather than serious consideration. They have noticed only in passing that his romanticism contains humor and social critique. Only D.R. Schwarz detects any progression in Disraeli's protagonists, and even he fails to see that, while retaining qualities of the romantic hero, they subtly undermine the status quo. For despite Disraeli's dyed-in-the-wool romanticism, he cannot avoid reacting to the real world confronting him, and this necessitates involving his protagonists in challenges from entrenched elites as well as from the emergent working and middle classes. Disraeli's ideas in working out these challenges, romantically colored as they are, deserve to be reconsidered, to maintain an awareness, first, that the road taken by the modem industrial state had its detractors, and, second, that dissent to the prevailing view always--and validly--exists.

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