The first anthology to address the relationship between the events of the Nazi genocide and the intellectual concerns of contemporary literary and cultural theory in one substantial and indispensable volume. This agenda-setting reader brings together both classic and new theoretical writings. Wide in its thematic scope, it covers such vital questions as: * Authenticity and experience * Memory and trauma * Historiography and the philosophy of history * Fascism and Nazi antisemitism * Representation and identity formation * Race, gender and genocide * The implications of the Holocaust for theories of the unconscious, ethics, politics and aesthetics The readings, which are fully contextualised by a general introduction, section introductions and bibliographical notes, represent the work of many influential writers and theorists, including Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Cathy Caruth, Saul Friedlander, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Theodor Adorno, Zygmunt Bauman, Paul Gilroy, Jacques Derrida, Hayden White and Shoshana Felman.