LEADER 00000cam  22004338i 4500 
001    ocn922155311 
003    OCoLC 
005    20160323030648.0 
008    160217s2016    nyu      b    000 0 eng   
010      2015036282 
020    9780190499280|q(hardback) 
020    0190499281|q(hardback) 
035    (OCoLC)922155311 
040    DLC|beng|erda|cDLC|dYDXCP|dBTCTA|dBDX|dOCLCO|dOCLCQ|dVKC
       |dUOK|dCGP|dNYP 
042    pcc 
049    CKEA 
050 00 PK2907.E7|bD66 2016 
082 00 891/.2093538|223 
084    REL032010|aLIT008020|2bisacsh 
100 1  Doniger, Wendy,|eauthor. 
245 10 Redeeming the Kamasutra /|cWendy Doniger. 
263    1603 
264  1 New York :|bOxford University Press,|c[2016] 
300    182 pages ;|c24 cm 
336    text|btxt|2rdacontent 
337    unmediated|bn|2rdamedia 
338    volume|bnc|2rdacarrier 
504    Includes bibliographical references. 
505 8  Introduction -- The Strange and the Familiar in the 
       Kamasutra -- The Kautilyan Kamasutra -- The Mythology of 
       the Kamasutra -- Women in the Kamasutra -- The Third 
       Nature: Gender Inversions -- The Mare's Trap: The Nature 
       and Culture of Sex -- The Rise and Fall of Kama and the 
       Kamasutra -- Notes. 
520    "The Kamasutra, composed in the third century CE, is the 
       world's most famous textbook of erotic love. There is 
       nothing remotely like it even today, and for its time it 
       was astonishingly sophisticated. Yet it is all but ignored
       as a serious work in its country of origin-sometimes taken
       as a matter of national shame rather than pride - and in 
       the rest of the world it is a source of amused amazement 
       and inspires magazine articles that offer "mattress-
       quaking sex styles" such as "the backstairs boogie" and 
       "the spider web". 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). In 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 procreation as the aim of sex,
       for instance - Doniger also shows us how it perpetuates 
       attitudes that have continued to darken human sexuality: 
       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. In 
       investigating and helping us understand a much celebrated 
       but under-appreciated text, Wendy Doniger has produced a 
       rich and compelling text of her own that will interest, 
       delight, and surprise scholars and lay readers alike"--
       |cProvided by publisher. 
520    "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. In investigating, and helping us understand, a
       much celebrated but under-appreciated text, Wendy Doniger 
       has produced a rich and compelling text of her own that 
       will interest, delight, and surprise scholars and lay 
       readers alike"--|cProvided by publisher. 
600 00 Vātsyāyana.|tKāmasūtra. 
650  0 Erotic literature, Sanskrit|xHistory and criticism. 
994    92|bCKE