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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).
Introduction
I. "Running with She-Wolves"?
II. The "New Hebrew Woman"
III. The Subject of Postmodernism
IV. Isreal and the European "Woman Question"
One: Emerging Subjects
I. The Masked Autobiography: Genre and Gender
II. What Does a Woman Want? Shulamit Lapid and the Feminist Romance
Two: Alterity Revisited: Gender Theory and Israeli Literary Feminism
I. Beauvior's Drama of Subjectivity
II. Beauvoir's "Daughters": Otherness as Difference
III. Postmodernism's "Other": Mother's Body, Mother's Tongue
IV. Empowering the M/Other?
Three: Empowering the Other: Amalia Kahana-Carmon
I. Feminine, Feminist, or Modernist?
II. A Brotherhood of Outsiders: Women/Jews/Blacks in Up in Montifer
III. The Brotherhood That Cannot Hold
Four: Who's Afraid of Androgyny? Virginia Woolf's "Gender" avant la lettre
I. Untangling the Homoerotic Web: Between Orlando and A Room of One's Own
II. Who's Afraid of Father and Mother(hood)? Back To The Lighthouse
III. Jewish Mothers and Israeli Androgyny
Five: Israeli Androgyny Under Siege: Shulamith Hareven
I. Gendered Selves in City of Many Days: Same, Different, or Repressed?
II. Androgynous "Jewish Parents"? Not in a War Zone!
III. Trauma and Homoeroticism: Loneliness, an Israeli Story
Six: The Leaning Ivory Tower: Feminist Politics
I. Oedipal Tyrannies: Woolf's Psychopolitics in Three Guineas
II. The Leaning Israeli Tower: Feminism Reinvented
III. Monotheistic Tyrannies: Israeli Psychopolitics
Seven: 1948—Hebrew "Gender" and Zionist Ideology: Netiva Ben Yehuda
Eight: Beyond The Feminist Romance: Ruth Almog
I. From The Madwoman in the Attic to The Women's Room
II. The Sins of Their Father(s); or, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl
III. Love and Work? Embracing the M/Other in Roots of Air
IV. From Hysteria to HerStory: Artistic Mending
Afterword: The Nineties—Prelude to a Postmodernist Millennium?