Literary Representations of the Palestine/Israel Conflict After the Second Intifada

This edited collection brings together discussions of literary works from Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the Palestinian and Jewish Diasporas, as well as from authors and creators not directly involved with the conflict who are seeking to unpack its complexities for a wider audience. It offers new perspectives into how the Palestine/Israel conflict is, and can be, represented after the Second Palestinian Intifada, an epochal event for both Israelis and Palestinians. This collection foregrounds the thematic concerns that link literary engagements with Palestine/Israel across the globe but also examines the role that aesthetic representation plays in framing the conflict and its power dynamics. It addresses how emergent forms of writing and representation illuminate but also redescribe conflict in the context of Israel and Palestine and how, as in the case of the investigative graphic novel for example, depicting this conflict has had reverberations for representing conflict and conflict zones more widely.

Ned Curthoys is Senior Lecturer in English and Literary Studies at the University of Western Australia and researches in areas including Jewish and Holocaust studies, representations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and narrative theory. His monograph The Legacy of Liberal Judaism: Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt’s Hidden Conversation (2013, paperback 2016) was published by Berghahn books. His work has appeared in Textual Practice, Comparative Literature Studies, Theory and Event, New Formations, Children’s Literature in Education, and College Literature (forthcoming). He is working on his second book examining the Bildungsroman as a shaping influence on historical fiction and film about the Second World War.

Isabelle Hesse is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research is situated at the intersection of Jewish, Middle Eastern and postcolonial studies and she is the author of The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism, and Colonialism (2016) and has co-edited Literary Representations of the Palestine/Israel Conflict after the Second Intifada (2022) with Ned Curthoys.