Blossom Which We Are

Nir Evron is Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University, Israel.

"The Blossom Which We Are retains the conceptual ambitions of a comparative study while still grounding its arguments within the historical particularity of a modernity cataloging cultural passing or transformation as first revolution but then extinction—a fact that invites applying The Blossom Which We Are to a global historicist sense of how realist fiction and cultural impermanence present themselves beyond the West." — Studies in English Literature"…[a] fascinating book … Are there other lines open to the humanities than either culturalist elegiacs or delusive universalism, the two paths suggested at the end of Evron's volume? What if the humanities were ready to move in a paradigmatically new direction? Whether choosing to stick with culturalism or consider other conceptual frameworks, readers will be significantly better positioned to act on the comparativist openings to the world that follow from Evron's historical review of culturalist discourse and his eye-opening linkage of it to writers as diverse as Wharton, Roth, and Shabtai." — Edith Wharton Review"The book is convincingly grounded in cultural and literary theory. In the ambitious final chapter Evron uses literary criticism to consider the current threat of extinction to the culture of academic humanities and, metaphorically, to Western culture writ large." — CHOICE"This book is gorgeously written. What might appear on its face as the yoking together of three culturally remote and only tangentially related texts turns out to function as a genealogy of and meditation upon the emergence of the experience of the culturally tangential." — Irene Tucker, author of The Moment of Racial Sight: A History

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Culturalism, Vulnerability, and Transience2. An Ironist's Elegy: Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence3. "Und siehe da: Es gab also fremde Länder!": Joseph Roth's Parochializing of Empire4. The Culturalization of Zionism: Yaakov Shabtai's Past Continuous5. Culturalism and Historicism in Contemporary Intellectual LifeWorks CitedIndex