The Bedtrick

The Bedtrick PDF Author: Wendy Doniger
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226156443
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 631

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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: 0226156443
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 631

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 Bed-trick in English Renaissance Drama

The Bed-trick in English Renaissance Drama PDF Author: Marliss C. Desens
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874134766
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
None of these assumptions has been tested against the evidence of the surviving plays from the period - an oversight that the present study seeks to remedy.

Weapons Upon Her Body

Weapons Upon Her Body PDF Author: Sandra Ladick Collins
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443845868
Category : Bibles
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
The biblical stories of Lot’s daughters, Tamar, Ruth and Bathsheba, share much in common – singular women who are left to rely upon their own wits to achieve some measure of victory over the men around them. Scholarly interpretation of these women often reduces them to mere stock characters who inform civic notions about Israel, the perennial underdog who, like these women, achieves against great odds. Or, they reflect the trickery and moral ambiguity inherent in their line as ancestresses of the House of David. However, when read for their gender information (and not for what they can tell readers about Israel), one finds women who employ strategies of deception and trickery, motivated by individual self-interest, in order to successfully maneuver within the system to their benefit. Such initiative can be seen as valorous: they save themselves through their own pluck and ingenuity. Thus, a close consideration of these stories finds that heroic biblical women carry their essential weapons upon and within themselves in their drive, their resolve and their cleverness. Using methods from biblical study as well as folklore, this study identifies biblical women motivated by self-interest coupled with deception and an incidence of the “bedtrick,” an instance of sexual trickery that challenges the text’s power and gender dynamics. This identification puts Lot’s daughters, Tamar, Ruth and Bathsheba, in league with female heroes from folk tale and legend. By contrasting and comparing common motifs and actions with traits established by other non-biblical female heroic narratives, strong heroic themes are located in all four narratives. This offers a dynamic argument for identifying the female biblical heroic. This work concludes that this new identification of heroic women in the Bible profoundly affects further interpretation of the Bible.

The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy

The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy PDF Author: Verna A. Foster
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351885340
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Focusing on European tragicomedy from the early modern period to the theatre of the absurd, Verna Foster here argues for the independence of tragicomedy as a genre that perceives and communicates human experience differently from the various forms of tragedy, comedy, and the drame (serious drama that is neither comic nor tragic). Foster posits that, in the sense of the dramaturgical and emotional fusion of tragic and comic elements to create a distinguishable new genre, tragicomedy has emerged only twice in the history of drama. She argues that tragicomedy first emerged and was controversial in the Renaissance; and that it has in modern times replaced tragedy itself as the most serious and moving of all dramatic genres. In the first section of the book, the author analyzes the name 'tragicomedy' and the genre's problems of identity; then goes on to explore early modern tragicomedies by Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger. A transitional chapter addresses cognate genres. The final section of the book focuses on modern tragicomedies by Ibsen, Chekhov, Synge, O'Casey, Williams, Ionesco, Beckett and Pinter. By exploring dramaturgical similarities between early modern and modern tragicomedies, Foster demonstrates the persistence of tragicomedy's generic markers and provides a more precise conceptual framework for the genre than has so far been available.

Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800

Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800 PDF Author: Virginia Mason Vaughan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521845847
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
An unusual study of the tradition of blackface in stage performance.

The Changeling

The Changeling PDF Author: Thomas Middleton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
The Changeling is a popular Renaissance tragedy in which the relationship between money, sex, and power is explored. Frequently performed and studied in University courses, it is a key text in the New Mermaids series.

The Implied Spider

The Implied Spider PDF Author: Wendy Doniger
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231156421
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Wendy Doniger's foundational study is both modern in its engagement with a diverse range of religions and refreshingly classic in its transhistorical, cross-cultural approach. By responsibly analyzing patterns and themes across context, Doniger reinvigorates the comparative reading of religion, tapping into a wealth of narrative traditions, from the instructive tales of Judaism and Christianity to the moral lessons of the Bhagavad Gita. She extracts political meaning from a variety of texts while respecting the original ideas of each. A new preface confronts the difficulty of contextualizing the comparison of religions as well as controversies over choosing subjects and positioning arguments, and the text itself is expanded and updated throughout.

Riven by Lust

Riven by Lust PDF Author: Jonathan A. Silk
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824864174
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Riven by Lust explores the tale of a man accused of causing the fundamental schism in early Indian Buddhism, but not before he has sex with his mother and kills his father. In tracing this Indian Buddhist Oedipal tale, Jonathan Silk follows it through texts in all of the major canonical languages of Buddhism, Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, Chinese, and Japanese, along the way noting parallels and contrasts with classical and medieval European stories such as the legend of the Oedipal Judas. Simultaneously, he investigates the psychological and anthropological understandings of the tale of mother-son incest in light of contemporary psychological and anthropological understandings of incest, with special attention to the question of why we consider it among the worst of crimes. In seeking to understand how the story worked in Indian texts and for Indian audiences—as well as how it might work for modern readers—this book has both horizontal and vertical dimensions, probing the place of the Oedipal in Indian culture, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, and simultaneously framing the Indian Oedipal within broader human concerns, thereby contributing to the study of the history of Buddhism, the transmission of narratives in the ancient world, and the fundamental nature of one aspect of human sexuality. Starting from a brief reference in a polemical treatise, Riven by Lust demonstrates that its authors borrowed and intentionally adapted a preexisting story of an Oedipal antihero. This recasting allowed them to calumniate their opponents in the strongest possible terms through the rhetoric of murder and incest. Silk draws on a wide variety of sources to demonstrate the range of thinking about incest in Indian Buddhist culture, thereby uncovering the strategies and working methods of the ancient polemicists. He argues that Indian Buddhists and Hindus, while occupying the same world for the most part, thought differently about fundamental issues such as incest, and hints at the consequent necessity of a reappraisal of our notions of the shape of the ancient cultural sphere they shared. Provocative and innovative, Riven by Lust is a paradigmatic analysis of a major theme of world mythology and a signal contribution to the study of the history of incest and comparative sexualities. It will attract readers interested in Buddhism, Indian studies, Asian studies, comparative culture, mythology, psychology, and the history of sexuality.

Bedtrick

Bedtrick PDF Author: Jinny Webber
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781944453145
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In late Elizabethan England, two women take a risky chance on a marriage of convenience, against the backdrop of Shakespeare's theater and the tumultuous politics at the end of the Tudor age.

Symbolism

Symbolism PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literature
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description