Love+marriage=death

by Sander L. Gilman

The essays in this collection, written by a pioneering interdisciplinary scholar, deal with the roles of images in the construction of stereotypes and the categories of difference as represented in texts - in high literature, in medical literature, in art - from the last fin-de-siecle to our own. Intensely engaged in the cultural politics of everyday life and conscious of how texts reflect and shape our social practices, they deal primarily with representations and self-representations of "Jews" in the past one hundred years and focus on the question of the constructions of the Jew's body in art and literature. The title essay, "Love + Marriage = Death: STDs and AIDS in the Modern World," however, studies the image of sexually transmitted disease from Shakespeare to Martin Amis. It sets the tone for an understanding of this collection as a book about Jews and their representation, but not as a special, isolated case.