Jonathan Kertzer

I specialize in modern British literature -- the first half of the twentieth century -- and Canadian literature, with special attention to modernism and literary history. In this regard I have written especially on poetics, fiction, and national literary history, as well as on rhetoric (rhetorical questions, the rhetoric of insult and intimacy). An earlier book, Poetic Argument, was concerned with the rationality of modernist poetics; while my last book, Worrying the Nation, was devoted to the problem of imagining a national literary history in multicultural Canada. I have published a book on literary ethics,and more specifically on the various formulations of justice) as they inform literary structures. I have secondary interests in ethnic literature, especially Jewish, and in teaching Shakespeare.