In Redeeming the Kamasutra, one of the world's foremost authorities on ancient Indian texts seeks to restore the Kamasutra to its proper place in the Sanskrit canon, as a landmark of India's secular ...literature.
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. What are the pleasures of reading translations of South Asian literature, and what does it take to enjoy a ...translated text? This volume provides opportunities to explore such questions by bringing together a whole set of new translations by David Shulman, noted scholar of South Asia. The translated selections come from a variety of Indian languages, genres, and periods, from the classical to the contemporary. The translations are accompanied by short essays written to help readers engage and enjoy them. Some of these essays provide background to enhance reading of the translation, whereas others model how to expand appreciation in comparative and broader ways. Together, the translations and the accompanying essays form an essential guide for people interested in literature and art from South Asia.
What Reason Promises Doniger, Wendy; Galison, Peter; Neiman, Susan
2016, 2016-06-20
eBook
This collection demonstrates the range of approaches that some of the leading scholars of our day take to basic questions at the intersection of the natural and human worlds. The essays focus on ...three interlocking categories: Reason stakes a bigger territory than the enclosed yard of universal rules. Nature expands over a far larger region than an eternal category of the natural. And history refuses to be confined to claims of an unencumbered truth of how things happened.
Offers a cross-cultural exploration of the theme of self-impersonation. The stories considered in this book range from ancient Indian literature through medieval European courtly literature and ...Shakespeare to Hollywood and Bollywood. They describe a human way of negotiating reality, illusion, identity, authenticity, memory, and more.
The two Alice books (Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass) have, from my earliest childhood, supplied the metaphors, images, and phrases with which I have explained my life to myself. ...The themes of hallucinogenic mushrooms and dreams dreamt have inspired several of the books I have written. Alice's ambivalence about eating creatures with whom she has conversations has haunted my own guilty carnivoraciousness. The forest where things have no names eases my own encroaching lethologica and prosopagnosia. And all the gentle jokes about death comfort me as I approach the end of this particular dream.
Though ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Indian texts tell tales of generous people rewarded for offering hospitality to strangers, particularly to gods in disguise, these strangers often subject their ...hosts to many torments. And the ancient mythology of hosts and guests tricked or forced to eat their own children suggests that the widespread laws enforcing hospitality to strangers were needed to counteract a basic human tendency to fear such guests, a fear that the mythology validates.
Originally published under the title Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva, this book traces the development of an Indian approach to an enduring human dilemma: the conflict between ...spiritual aspirations and human desires. The work examines hundreds of related myths and a wide range of Indian texts--Vedic, Puranic, classical, modern, and tribal--centering on the stories of the great ascetic, Siva, and his erotic alter ego, Kama.
The actual mechanism that works the magic does not really seem to matter; the range of magic objects that can make people invisible is surprisingly wide. People can see this in the Stith Thompson ...Motif-Index of Folk Literature, which lists, under the evocative rubric of "D1361," subheaded "Magic object renders invisible," in no particular order that the author can discern and with rich idiosyncrasies reminiscent of Borges' famous catalogue of Chinese animals ((1942) 1993), the things that make people invisible in folktales. Clearly the actual substance of the object is of little or no symbolic meaning; it is the way it is used that makes it magic. More precisely, it is the way it is used to do what the Shadow did to become invisible in the old radio plays: fog the minds of men (and women).
Issues of sexuality and gender are hotly contested in both religious communities and national cultures around the world. In the social sciences, religious traditions are often depicted as inherently ...conservative or even reactionary in their commitments to powerful patriarchal and pronatalist sexual norms and gender categories. In illuminating the practices of religious traditions in various cultures, these essays expose the diversity of religious rituals and mythologies pertaining to sexuality. In the process the contributors challenge conventional notions of what is normative in our sexual lives.
