The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade

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University of Chicago Press, 2000 - 598 oldal
"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.

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Tartalomjegyzék

Sex Text and Masquerade
1
Telling the Difference 5 Sexual Lies and Sexual
10
The Rape of the False Mother
69
Waking Up in Bed with an Animal
105
Snakes and Mermaids 114 The Fatal
122
The LovelyLoathly Lady
140
Old Women Masquerading as Young Women 151
151
The Cuckolds of the Heart
205
CrossCultural CrossDressing
335
Incest
383
Entendre 404 A Lover by Any Other Name
407
Just a Kiss 420 Penis Envy 424 The Womens Room 427
427
The Return of the Return of Martin Guerre 428 Sexual
462
Splitting Hares 466 Minimal and Other Pairs 467
472
Carnal Ignorance 475 Carnal Knowledge 482 False
487
Bedtricks in Stith Thompsons
493

on His Collar
228
man Blindness and Divine Invisibility
234
Diritto della Signora 275 Hindu Subversions of the Droit
282
Color Class and Clout
292
Bibliography
535
Double Features Bedtricks and Related
567
Index and Glossary
577
Copyright

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Gyakori szavak és kifejezések

A szerzőről (2000)

Wendy Doniger is the Mircea Eliade Professor of the History of Religions in the Divinity School and a professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her most recent books are The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth and Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press.

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