The Bedtrick

The Bedtrick PDF Author: Wendy Doniger
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226156439
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 638

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Book Description
"Somehow I woke up one day and found myself in bed with a stranger." Meant literally or figuratively, this statement describes one of the best-known plots in world mythology and popular storytelling. In a tour that runs from Shakespeare to Hollywood and from Abraham Lincoln to Casanova, the erudite and irrepressible Wendy Doniger shows us the variety, danger, and allure of the "bedtrick," or what it means to wake up with a stranger. The Bedtrick brings together hundreds of stories from all over the world, from the earliest recorded Hindu and Hebrew texts to the latest item in the Weekly World News, to show the hilariously convoluted sexual scrapes that people manage to get themselves into and out of. Here you will find wives who accidentally commit adultery with their own husbands. You will read Lincoln's truly terrible poem about a bedtrick. You will learn that in Hong Kong the film The Crying Game was retitled Oh No! My Girlfriend Has a Penis. And that President Clinton was not the first man to be identified by an idiosyncratic organ. At the bottom of these wonderful stories, ancient myths, and historical anecdotes lie the dynamics of sex and gender, power and identity. Why can't people tell the difference in the dark? Can love always tell the difference between one lover and another? And what kind of truth does sex tell? Funny, sexy, and engaging, The Bedtrick is a masterful work of energetic storytelling and dazzling scholarship. Give it to your spouse and your lover.

The Bedtrick

The Bedtrick PDF Author: Wendy Doniger
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226156439
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 638

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Somehow I woke up one day and found myself in bed with a stranger." Meant literally or figuratively, this statement describes one of the best-known plots in world mythology and popular storytelling. In a tour that runs from Shakespeare to Hollywood and from Abraham Lincoln to Casanova, the erudite and irrepressible Wendy Doniger shows us the variety, danger, and allure of the "bedtrick," or what it means to wake up with a stranger. The Bedtrick brings together hundreds of stories from all over the world, from the earliest recorded Hindu and Hebrew texts to the latest item in the Weekly World News, to show the hilariously convoluted sexual scrapes that people manage to get themselves into and out of. Here you will find wives who accidentally commit adultery with their own husbands. You will read Lincoln's truly terrible poem about a bedtrick. You will learn that in Hong Kong the film The Crying Game was retitled Oh No! My Girlfriend Has a Penis. And that President Clinton was not the first man to be identified by an idiosyncratic organ. At the bottom of these wonderful stories, ancient myths, and historical anecdotes lie the dynamics of sex and gender, power and identity. Why can't people tell the difference in the dark? Can love always tell the difference between one lover and another? And what kind of truth does sex tell? Funny, sexy, and engaging, The Bedtrick is a masterful work of energetic storytelling and dazzling scholarship. Give it to your spouse and your lover.

The Viagra Alternative

The Viagra Alternative PDF Author: Marc Bonnard
Publisher: Inner Traditions / Bear & Co
ISBN: 9780892817894
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
For those men who wish to avoid the risks of Viagra, this handbook offers themost up-to-date on natural, safe, and long-term cures for impotence.

Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio

Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio PDF Author: Pu Songling
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141928522
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 562

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Book Description
The Strange Tales of Pu Songling (1640-1715) are exquisite and amusing miniatures that are regarded as the pinnacle of classical Chinese fiction. With their elegant prose, witty wordplay and subtle charm, the 104 stories in this selection reveal a world in which nothing is as it seems. Here a Taoist monk conjures up a magical pear tree, a scholar recounts his previous incarnations, a woman out-foxes the fox-spirit that possesses her, a child bride gives birth to a thimble-sized baby, a ghostly city appears out of nowhere and a heartless daughter-in-law is turned into a pig. In his tales of humans coupling with shape-shifting spirits, bizarre phenomena, haunted buildings and enchanted objects, Pu Songling pushes back the boundaries of human experience and enlightens as he entertains.

The Fountainhead of Chinese Erotica

The Fountainhead of Chinese Erotica PDF Author: Charles R. Stone
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824862589
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
The Lord of Perfect Satisfaction (Ruyijun zhuan), a short work of fiction from the early sixteenth century, tells the story of the Tang dynasty's notorious Wu Zetian, the only woman to rule as emperor of China. It is famous not for the history it relates, but for its graphic sexual descriptions--the first ever in a Chinese novel--purportedly given from a woman's point of view. Despite its renown and unmistakable influence on later writing, the origins and significance of the Ruyijun zhuan have never been explored, in any language, and until now it has never been translated. Its date of composition is unknown, its author unidentified. One of its earliest appraisals, written by a contemporary scholar known for his conservatism, maintains that the Ruyijun zhuan is a moral work notwithstanding its sexual content. Combining a complete translation with a detailed and far-ranging study of the text, The Fountainhead of Chinese Erotica places this important cultural document into historical context and offers possibilities on its meaning.

Literati and Self-Re/Presentation

Literati and Self-Re/Presentation PDF Author: Martin Huang
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804763925
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
This study of the Chinese novel in the eighteenth century, arguably one of the greatest periods of the genre, focuses on the autobiographical features of three important works: The Dream of the Red Chamber, or The Story of the Stone (Honglou meng), The Scholars (Rulin waishi), and the relatively neglected The Humble Words of an Old Rustic (Yesou puyan). The author seeks for answers to the question of why the Chinese novel was becoming increasingly autobiographical during the eighteenth century, even as explicitly autobiographical writing was in a decline. He suggests that several new trends in the development of the genre (such as the accelerated "literatization" process) and the changing status of literati contributed to the rise of this new feature of the novel. As office-holding became increasingly unavailable to many literati, new roles and new identities that allowed them to retain a claim to membership in the elite had to be found. The novel, with its ability to distance an author from himself, facilitated the exploration of alternative roles and identities. Through close readings of the three texts, the author examines various autobiographical strategies employed by the authors, among which "masking as other"—How the authorial self is re/presented as an other - stands out as the most significant. The book links the authors' obsession with masks both to an increasingly ambiguous sense of self-identity experienced by many literati and to the larger issue of literati self-representation. Throughout, the readings do not confine themselves to purely literary matters; they also analyze the three works as a complex artifact typical of literati "self" culture and situate them in the larger intellectual history of the period.

One Into Many

One Into Many PDF Author: Tak-hung Leo Chan
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042008151
Category : Chinese language
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
This is the first anthology of its kind in English that deals in depth with the translation of Chinese texts, literary and philosophical, into a host of Western and Asian languages: English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Hebrew, Slovak and Korean. After an introduction by the editor, in which multiple translations are compared to the many lives lived by the original in its new incarnations, 13 articles are presented in 3 sections.

Historian of the Strange

Historian of the Strange PDF Author: Judith T. Zeitlin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804729689
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 700

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Book Description
This is the first book in English on the seventeenth-century Chinese masterpiece Liaozhai's Records of the Strange (Liaozhai zhiyi) by Pu Songling, a collection of nearly five hundred fantastic tales and anecdotes written in Classical Chinese.

The Chinese Virago

The Chinese Virago PDF Author: Yenna Wu
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684170206
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Drawing from a broad array of literary, historical, dramatic and anecdotal sources, Yenna Wu makes a rich exploration of an unusually prominent theme in premodern Chinese prose fiction and drama: that of jealous and belligerent wives, or viragos, who dominate their husbands and abuse other women. Focusing on Chinese literary works from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, she presents many colorful perspectives on this type of aggression, reviewing early literary and historical examples of the phenomenon. Wu argues that although the various portraits of the virago often reveal the writers' insecurities about strong-willed women in general, the authors also satirize the kind of man whose behavioral patterns have been catalysts for female aggression. She also shows that, while the women in these works are to some extent male constructs designed to affirm the patriarchal system, various elements of these portraits constitute a subversive form of parody that casts a revealing light on the patriarchal hierarchy of premodern China.

Stories Old and New

Stories Old and New PDF Author:
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 029580128X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 826

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Book Description
Stories Old and New is the first complete translation of Feng Menglong’s Gujin xiaoshuo (also known as Yushi mingyan, Illustrious Words to Instruct the World), a collection of 40 short stories first published in 1620 in China. This is considered the best of Feng’s three such collections and was a pivotal work in the development of vernacular fiction. The stories are valuable as examples of early fiction and for their detailed depiction of daily life among a broad range of social classes. The stories are populated by scholars and courtesans, spirits and ghosts, Buddhist monks and nuns, pirates and emperors, and officials both virtuous and corrupt. The streets and abodes of late-Ming China come alive in Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang’s smooth and colorful translation of these entertaining tales. Stories Old and New has long been popular in China and has been published there in numerous editions. Although some of the stories have appeared in English translations in journals and anthologies, they have not previously been presented sequentially in thematic pairs as arranged by Feng Menglong. This unabridged translation, illustrated with a selection of woodcuts from the original Ming dynasty edition and including Feng’s interlinear notes and marginal comments, as well as all of the verse woven throughout the text, allows the modern reader to experience the text as did its first audience nearly four centuries ago. For other titles in the collection go to http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/books/ming.html

Alien Kind

Alien Kind PDF Author: Rania Huntington
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684173825
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
To discuss the supernatural in China is “to talk of foxes and speak of ghosts.” Ming and Qing China were well populated with foxes, shape-changing creatures who transgressed the boundaries of species, gender, and the metaphysical realm. In human form, foxes were both immoral succubi and good wives/good mothers, both tricksters and Confucian paragons. They were the most alien yet the most common of the strange creatures a human might encounter. Rania Huntington investigates a conception of one kind of alien and attempts to establish the boundaries of the human. As the most ambiguous alien in the late imperial Chinese imagination, the fox reveals which boundaries around the human and the ordinary were most frequently violated and, therefore, most jealously guarded. Each section of this book traces a particular boundary violated by the fox and examines how maneuvers across that boundary change over time: the narrative boundaries of genre and texts; domesticity and the outside world; chaos and order; the human and the non-human; class; gender; sexual relations; and the progression from animal to monster to transcendent. As “middle creatures,” foxes were morally ambivalent, endowed with superhuman but not quite divine powers; like humans, they occupied a middle space between the infernal and the celestial.