Showing all 4 books
From Shakuntala to Scheherazade to Marilyn Monroe, from Ancient India and Greece to Medieval Europe to modern cinema, sexual desire and jewelry, particularly rings, have been very often connected. Why do jewels keep appearing in stories about marriage and adultery, love and betrayal, loss and recovery, identity and masquerade? What is the mythology that makes finger rings symbols of true (or, as the case may be, untrue) love across the world?
Wendy ...
Wendy Doniger and Martha Nussbaum bring together leading scholars from a wide array of disciplines to address a crucial question: How does the world's most populous democracy survive repeated assaults on its pluralistic values? India's stunning linguistic, cultural, and religious diversity has been supported since Independence by a political structure that emphasizes equal rights for all, and protects liberties of religion and speech. But a decent Constitution ...
Hindu and Greek mythologies teem with gendered narratives of doubling and bifurcation: stories of women and men who are doubled, who double themselves, who are seduced by Gods doubling as mortals, whose bodies are split or divided. Wendy Doniger recounts and compares a vast range of these tales from ancient Greece and India, with occasional recourse to more recent 'double features' from Dr. Jekyll and Ms Hyde to Face/Off. Myth, Doniger argues, responds to the ...
The cultivation of pleasure was brought to its height with the Kamasutra--the Hindu text of erotic love. This sophisticated and provocative teaching from ancient India has continued to intrigue us for generations, offering explicit instructions in the art of living and lovemaking. Now, Wendy Doniger, one of the world's foremost scholars of Sanskrit and Hindu mythology, offers a fresh and insightful new translation of this treasury of sensual secrets with The ...