Redeeming the Kamasutra

by Doniger, Wendy

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Title Statements

Full title :Redeeming the Kamasutra. / Wendy Doniger.

Summary

In this scholarly and superbly readable book, 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. She reveals fascinating aspects of the Kamasutra as a guide to the art of living for the cosmopolitan beau monde of ancient India: its emphasis on grooming and etiquette (including post-coital conversation), the study and practice of the arts (ranging from cooking and composing poetry to coloring one's teeth and mixing perfumes), and discretion and patience in conducting affairs (especially adulterous affairs).0In its encyclopedic social and psychological narratives, it also displays surprisingly modern ideas about gender and role-playing, female sexuality, and homosexual desire. Even as she draws our attention to the many ways in which the Kamasutra challenges the conventions of its time (and often ours)-in dismissing fertility as the aim of sex, for instance-Doniger also shows us how it perpetuates attitudes that have continued to darken human intercourse: passages that twin passion with violence, for example, and those that explain away women's protests and exclamations of pain as ploys to excite their male partners. In these attitudes, as in its more enlightened observations on sexual love, we see the nearly two- thousand-year-old Kamasutra mirror twenty-first-century realities.

Edition Statements

Publication Date:2016.

Publication Statements

Publisher(s):Oxford University Press
Place of Publication:Corby
Language:eng
Publication Date:2016.

The Physical Object

Description:192 pages

Edition Identifiers

ISBN:9780190499280, 0190499281
oclc:ocn946010520
LC Classification:PN
Dewey Decimal:800

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