Re-imagining the Ghetto: Introduction to the Forum "The Ghetto as a Victorian Text"

In seventeenth-century literature on the Grand Tour, the ghetto of Venice appears as a place of cross-cultural exchange and misunderstanding, a contact zone that stimulates interrogation and translation, comparison and projection, prejudice and discovery. The ghetto goes into eclipse in the English letters of the Enlightenment, to re-emerge in a number of Victorian texts. The essays of this forum show how the renewed interest in the Italian Ghettoes served two late Victorian writers, Israel Zangwill and Amy Levy, to reflect on their own modern British and Jewish identity.