The Book of the Virgins

The Book of the Virgins PDF Author: Gabriele D'Annunzio
Publisher: Hesperus Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
The Book of the Virgins, published here in its first English translation, is one of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s very first collections. Remarkable for its descriptive powers, it is a compelling account of self-knowledge and coming-of-age. Recovering from a near-fatal illness, a young woman resolves to experience for herself all that life has to offer. Spurning her old saintly ways, she sets out to explore the beauty and energy in everything around her. But as she senses the first stirrings of passion, so too comes tragedy, and with it, the realization that to truly live, she must embrace life in all its brutality. Poet, dramatist, novelist, and one of the most popular and controversial Italian writers of the 20th century, Gabriele D’Annunzio represented the very height of decadence in Italy.

The Virgins

The Virgins PDF Author: Pamela Erens
Publisher: Tin House Books
ISBN: 1935639625
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
It’s 1979, and Aviva Rossner and Seung Jung are notorious at Auburn Academy. They’re an unlikely pair at an elite East Coast boarding school (she’s Jewish; he’s Korean American) and hardly shy when it comes to their sexuality. Aviva is a formerly bookish girl looking for liberation from an unhappy childhood; Seung is an enthusiastic dabbler in drugs and a covert rebel against his demanding immigrant parents. In the minds of their titillated classmates—particularly that of Bruce Bennett-Jones—the couple lives in a realm of pure, indulgent pleasure. But, as is often the case, their fabled relationship is more complicated than it seems: despite their lust and urgency, their virginity remains intact, and as they struggle to understand each other, the relationship spirals into disaster. The Virgins is the story of Aviva and Seung’s descent into confusion and shame, as re-imagined in richly detailed episodes by their classmate Bruce, a once-embittered voyeur turned repentant narrator. With unflinching honesty and breathtaking prose, Pamela Erens brings a fresh voice to the tradition of the great boarding school novel.

The Book of the Virgins

The Book of the Virgins PDF Author: Gabriele D'Annunzio
Publisher: Hesperus Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Book of the Virgins, published here in its first English translation, is one of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s very first collections. Remarkable for its descriptive powers, it is a compelling account of self-knowledge and coming-of-age. Recovering from a near-fatal illness, a young woman resolves to experience for herself all that life has to offer. Spurning her old saintly ways, she sets out to explore the beauty and energy in everything around her. But as she senses the first stirrings of passion, so too comes tragedy, and with it, the realization that to truly live, she must embrace life in all its brutality. Poet, dramatist, novelist, and one of the most popular and controversial Italian writers of the 20th century, Gabriele D’Annunzio represented the very height of decadence in Italy.

The Virgin Suicides

The Virgin Suicides PDF Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307401936
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters—beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys—commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family’s fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life.

Menacing Virgins

Menacing Virgins PDF Author: Kathleen Coyne Kelly
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874136494
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
The essays in Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance examine the nexus of religious, political, economic, and aesthetic values that produce the Western European myth of virginity, and explore how those complex cultural forces animate, empower, discipline, disclose, mystify, and menace the virginal body. As the title suggests, the virgin can be seen alternately or even simultaneously as menaced or menacing. To chart the history of virginity as a steady, evolutionary progression from a religious ideal in the Middle Ages toward a more secularized or sovereign ideal in the Renaissance would obscure how unstable a concept chastity is in both periods. What this collection demonstrates is that medieval and early modern attitudes toward virginity are not general and evolutionary, but specific, changeable, and often conflicted.

Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England

Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England PDF Author: Sarah Salih
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 0859916227
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Medieval virginity theory explored through study of martyrs, nuns and Margery Kempe. This study looks at the question of what it meant to be a virgin in the Middle Ages, and the forms which female virginity took. It begins with the assumptions that there is more to virginity than sexual inexperience, and that virginity may be considered as a gendered identity, a role which is performed rather than biologically determined. The author explores versions of virginity as they appear in medieval saints' lives, in the institutional chastity of nuns, and as shown in the book of Margery Kempe, showing how it can be active, contested, vulnerable but also recoverable. SARAH SALIH teaches in the Department of English at King's College London.

From Moon Goddesses to Virgins

From Moon Goddesses to Virgins PDF Author: Peter Herman Sigal
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292798984
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
For the preconquest Maya, sexuality was a part of ritual discourse and performance, and all sex acts were understood in terms of their power to create, maintain, and destroy society. As postconquest Maya adapted to life under colonial rule, they neither fully abandoned these views nor completely adopted the formulation of sexuality prescribed by Spanish Catholicism. Instead, they evolved hybridized notions of sexual desire, represented in the figure of the Virgin Mary as a sexual goddess, whose sex acts embodied both creative and destructive components. This highly innovative book decodes the process through which this colonization of Yucatan Maya sexual desire occurred. Pete Sigal frames the discussion around a series of texts, including the Books of Chilam Balam and the Ritual of the Bacabs, that were written by seventeenth and eighteenth century Maya nobles to elucidate the history, religion, and philosophy of the Yucatecan Maya communities. Drawing on the insights of philology, discourse analysis, and deconstruction, he analyzes the sexual fantasies, fears, and desires that are presented, often unintentionally, in the "margins" of these texts and shows how they illuminate issues of colonialism, power, ritual, and gender.

Church Fathers, Independent Virgins

Church Fathers, Independent Virgins PDF Author: Joyce E. Salisbury
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9780860915966
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
This startling study of early Christian attitudes toward sexuality begins with an account of the different stances adopted by the Church—from the Early Fathers’ view that sex and the female body were irredeemably unholy, to Augustine’s contention that sex was natural, but lust was evil. While the Church Fathers struggled to reach consistent theoretical conclusions, the underlying conflation of ‘women’ with ‘sex’ meant that patristic statements on chastity, virginity and marriage effectively read as ecclesiastical law governing women’s conduct. Joyce Salisbury explains the relationship between Church doctrine and the position of women by placing these official views alongside an ascetic tradition which resisted the constraints imposed by sexual intercourse. Through an examination of texts of female and popular authorship, and the extraordinary lives of seven women saints—including the transvestites Castissima and Pelagia—she presents a markedly different picture of sexual and social roles. For many of these women, celibacy became a form of emancipation. Church Fathers, Independent Virgins bears witness to the entrenched power of the Church to oppress, the continuing power of women to overcome, and the enduring effects of medieval sexual attitudes.

The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England

The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England PDF Author: Mary Clayton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521531153
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This book provides a wide-ranging exploration of the cult in England from c. 700 to the Conquest. Dr Clayton describes and illustrates with a plate section the development of Marian devotion, discussing Anglo-Saxon feasts of the Virgin, liturgical texts, prayers, art, poetry and prose.

Virgins' death

Virgins' death PDF Author: Redhya
Publisher: Redhya
ISBN: 1948147068
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
The peaceful town of Kathgodam is in panic following the mysterious deaths of a few students in the local school. No one seems to know if these are murders or suicides. Inspectors Shamsher and Farooq are on the case, but this is no ordinary case.

Virgin

Virgin PDF Author: Hanne Blank
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1596910119
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
A provocative social history examines the history of virginity and of noted virgins in Western culture, describing the unique fascination civilization has had for virginity from a social, political, economic, philosophical, medical, and legal standpoint. Reprint.