Utopia and dystopia in the British Jewish poetry of Ruth Fainlight and Elaine Feinstein

Abstract

Abstract This article discusses how two contemporary British Jewish poets, Ruth Fainlight and Elaine Feinstein, respond to utopian and dystopian narratives. These narratives, it suggests, relate to a tradition of biblical messianism. In a British cultural context, they oscillate between a Milton–Blake–Parry messianism and a dystopianism often based on constructions of antisemitism. The article argues that Ruth Fainlight seeks an aestheticized utopia in art, and that art offers her poems a universalist language through which to synthesize utopian–dystopian oppositions. By contrast, Elaine Feinstein constructs a romanticized exilic utopia that transcends the limitations imposed on British Jewish culture. Rather than overlooking the significance of the Holocaust for both poets, the analysis stresses that their utopian visions are often juxtaposed against the Shoah imagined as a type of dystopia.