548 BOOK REVIEWS Michael Ragussis. Theatrical Nation:Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in Georgian Britain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Pp. 247. $55.00. When Michael Ragussis’s pioneering Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity was published fifteen years ago, there were not many other treatments ofJewish representations in nineteenthcentury British literature. The major monograph on the topic, Edgar Rosenberg’s From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Literature, thirty-five years earlier, assumed a critical world dominated by New Criti cism and was written long before the theory wars, cultural studies, postcol onialism, and gender studies. A generation later Sander Gilman’s culturalstudies approach to Jewish representations in Jewish Self-Hatred: AntiSemitism and the Hidden Language ofJews (1986) andJew’s Body (1991) pro vided theoretically current examples of writing about Jewishness. Ragus sis’s 1995 monograph was joined in the same year by Frank Felsenstein’s Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660—1830, Bryan Cheyette’s Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875—1945, coming a year later, and the Boyarin brothers’ anthology of the “New Jewish Cultural Studies” a year after that. These four scholarly works, in addition to Gilman’s books and Todd M. Endelman’s historical writing on Anglo-Jewry, established the template on which later criticism would proceed. Since then there has been a steadily increasing number of monographs, articles, book chapters, dissertations, and collected essays on Anglo-Jewish writing, Jewish rep resentations in various national contexts (from English and American to French and German), and Jewish cultural studies (from queer theory to “tough Jews”). IfJews and Jewishness in literary studies had been some what neglected before the 1990s, the same cannot be said now. Ragussis’s new monograph is on how Jewish theatrical representations— and Irish and Scottish as well—relate to national identity. His earlier study stressed Protestant efforts to convertJews and maintain the Christian nature of the British state, whereas the present study deals little with religion and much more with ethnic identity. According to the 1995 book, the well subsidized but ineffectual attempts to convert Jews to Protestantism were inspired by millenarian narratives and myths about moral-religious prog ress. These cultural currents manifested themselves in literary treatments of the Jew in Scott, Edgeworth, Dickens, Aguilar, Arnold, Eliot, Disraeli, Trollope, and others. Ragussis describes various revisions of the core con version narratives that derive from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, as Shylock and Jessica compete with newer versions of male and female Jewish ness. Ragussis traces a recurrent pattern: some aspects of the dominant SiR, 50 (Fall 2011) BOOK REVIEWS 549 Shakespearean paradigm get revised philosemitically—Scott’s Rebecca does not convert as Jessica did, Eliot’s Christian hero Deronda converts to Judaism—but other parts remain untouched—Scott’s Isaac is just a lesser Shylock, Eliot’s Cohen family is materialistic and without Bildung, as are most of Trollope’s Jewish characters. Whereas Figures of Conversion dealt mostly with canonical fiction, the new monograph deals mostly with unfa miliar plays. Just asJewish literary studies began to flourish in the 1990s, so too studies of Georgian and Romantic-era theater emerged at the same time. Scholars directed their attention to the concept of theatricality and to once popular but now neglected plays (i.e., the Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama [2003] edited by Jeffrey N. Cox and Michael Gamer provides an orienta tion to this area of study). Except for Scott and Byron, the canonical Ro mantic poets were not read extensively in their own time, but theater was popular culture, which makes dramatic literature a better vehicle for un covering sociological meanings. When Theatrical Nation asks repeatedly what cultural work the plays perform, it does not seem outlandish—to use one of the keywords in the study—because the audiences made their pref erences clear, even sometimes loudly protesting and rioting. Ragussis’s ar gument is that the Georgian theater responded symptomatically to the po litical project of forging a British nation from different ethnic groups. The 1707 Act of Union with Scotland, the “Jew Bill” of 1753, and Act of Union with...