Rethinking Holocaust Literature: Contexts, Canons, Circulations

With the passing of the final survivors, the Nazi genocide of European Jews is at last truly becoming historical. Yet antisemitic and other racial prejudice, hate speech, and violence are everywhere still present and indeed surging. In the context of ethnic and religious conflict, popularism, social and economic precariousness, and even pandemic, the Holocaust is variously invoked as a warning from history; a moral, legal, and political imperative to promote and even enforce universal human rights; and in social and cultural controversies from abortion, animal rights, and climate change to COVID-19 mask mandates and anti-vaccination misinformation.

Literary responses to the Holocaust have significantly shaped global awareness of the genocide. Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi are most often cited and their texts circulate widely. However, there is a vastly larger number of works that constitute Holocaust literature, composed across the decades, in a variety of languages, and around the world. As the canon has expanded, scholars have identified ever more exemplars of testimony, documentary, poetry, fiction, and other forms. Such works are often arranged within the conventional categories of nation, period, and genre that, in the context of the Holocaust, may be more or less artificial given the transnational and trans-epochal nature of the events and the literary response to them. In the analysis of individual texts the focus has largely remained on the author's own Holocaust experience, the authenticity of the representation, the moral response, the intergenerational transmission of trauma, or formal innovations.

This project aims to theorise Holocaust Literature (HL) as a literary system defined by inequalities of power, resources, and privilege between different experiences, geographies, and languages. In Phase 1, the project's international, multi-lingual team will consolidate and critically assess recent developments in HL research, e.g. gender; minor languages; intersectionality; underrepresented sites and methods of mass killing; the role of translation and the publishing industry, etc. In Phase 2, we will build on new thinking in World Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and Jewish Studies to explore how texts BECOME Holocaust Literature. Focussing on the key concepts of context, canons, and circulations, we will compare across geographies and languages: 1. the social, political, and cultural conditions under which HL texts are produced at different times and in diverse places; 2. the mechanisms by which HL texts become canonical; and 3. how HL texts circulate transnationally and globally and impact within ever-changing memory discourses. While pathbreaking work in each of these areas has appeared in the last decade, this project will be the first to approach HL as a literary system, comparatively and at scale, in order to provide compelling evidence for the interaction between contexts, canons, and circulations and for how this interaction can break down, produce unexpected results, or be subverted. The project promises new insights into the construction of HL, individual works, and the literary-theoretical debates that frame the project.

The project will be co-created iteratively through online and face-to-face workshops and with an international Advisory Board. The primary outcome is a Cambridge History of Holocaust Literature, commissioned by CUP as an authoritative investigation of the volume, diversity, and constitution of HL since 1933. The book will be complemented, in Phase 3, by an edited volume of exemplary readings aimed at students, an international public engagement programme, and dissemination at the Association of Jewish Studies. Together, these outcomes will contribute to consolidating HL research, diversifying the HL canon, enriching theoretical debates, and decolonising the curriculum. Three PDRAs will be trained in editing, international collaboration, and project management.