Search results for ""Author Yael Feldman""

Unlike the literary traditions of the United States, England, and France, the first century of Hebrew literature was lacking in women novelists; women tended to write poetry, while prose fiction was mainly the domain of male writers. Since the 1980s, however, there has been a virtual explosion of commercially successful Hebrew fiction by women that includes many traditionally male genres, such as the historical novel, fictional autobiography, and the mystery novel. No Room of Their Own is a comparative analysis of recent Israeli fiction by women and some of its Western models, from Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir to Marilyn French and Marie Cardinal. Feldman shows the richness and subtleties of Israeli women's fiction as she explores the themes of gender and nation, as well as the (non)representation of the "New Hebrew Woman" in five authors-the "foremothers" of the contemporary boom in Israeli Women's fiction: Amalia Kahana-Carmon (Up on Montifer, With Her on Her Way Home), Shulamith Hareven (City of Many Days, Thirst, The Vocabulary of Peace), Netiva BenYehuda (The Palmach Trilogy), Ruth Almog (Women, The Story of a [Writer's] Block, Roots of Air), and Shulamit Lapid (Gei Oni).

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Glory and Agony is the first history of the shifting attitudes toward national sacrifice in Hebrew culture over the last century. Its point of departure is Zionism's obsessive preoccupation with its haunting "primal scene" of sacrifice, the near-sacrifice of Isaac, as evidenced in wide-ranging sources from the domains of literature, art, psychology, philosophy, and politics. By placing these sources in conversation with twentieth-century thinking on human sacrifice, violence, and martyrdom, this study draws a complex picture that provides multiple, sometimes contradictory insights into the genesis and gender of national sacrifice. Extending back over two millennia, this study unearths retellings of biblical and classical narratives of sacrifice, both enacted and aborted, voluntary and violent, male and female—Isaac, Ishmael, Jephthah's daughter, Iphigenia, Jesus. Glory and Agony traces the birth of national sacrifice out of the ruins of religious martyrdom, exposing the sacred underside of Western secularism in Israel as elsewhere.

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