The Feminist Jordanian Novel: Mapping Beginnings and Scope

For a significant time, Jordanian writers have written books and a number of resources on the Jordanian novel, its developments and the main issues that it addressed. However, most of these resources discuss the commitment of the Jordanian novel to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is understandable given the close political, geographical and social relationship between Jordan and Palestine. As the resources that address feminist issues in the novel remain scarce in Jordan, this lecture attempts to shed light on the beginnings of the ‘social’ Jordanian novel as a prelude to the feminist one. In their attempts to document the beginnings of the feminist novel, Jordanian writers tend to conflate female with feminist. As the line between the female and feminist remains blurred in terms of classification, this lecture seeks to investigate challenges, themes and scope of researching the feminist novel in Jordan. A thematic breakdown of contemporary Jordanian feminist novels is then offered in hope of facilitating future research around this topic that remains under researched in Jordan.