 |
 |
 |
||||||||||||||
              |
Book Information | About the book | Reviews | |||||||||||||
 |
Woman
at the Window Biblical Tales of Oppression and Escape Nehama Aschkenasy |
In creative, analytical retellings of biblical tales about women, Aschkenasy demonstrates how recurring situations, dilemmas, and modes of conduct represent the politics of women's realities in premodern civilization—how women's lives in those times were characterized by social and legal limitations which some accepted and others challenged. Through these stories, Aschkenasy reveals how Hebraic culture saw man as a creature of time and a shaper of history and woman as a creature of nature and instrument of procreation. She also offers a close examination of female rhetoric and verbal expression as an alternative to spatial mobility, showing how biblical women used language in creative ways to overcome the constraints of their lives. Drawing on modern literary and feminist criticism as well as on behavioral and social theories, Aschkenasy shows that these ancient tales uncover age-old cultural biases that have survived through history and allows contemporary women to better understand their own lives. | "This
book is driven by vision and insights . . . the reader familiar with the
original story experiences it again, but with deeper understanding . . .
[Aschkenasy] demonstrates brilliantly how, in this patriarchal culture,
some women become powerful by virtue of action, some by cunning, and some
by exploiting their verbal talents." —David H. Hirsch, Brown University Nehama Aschkenasy is a professor and the director of the Center for Judaic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Connecticut at Stamford. |
|||||||||||||
| $44.95s cloth / ISBN 0-8143-2626-9 $22.95s paper / ISBN 0-8143-2627-7 256 pages 1998 contents > introduction [partial] > extract > index > |
||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|