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Bedtrick,The: Tales of Sex and Masquerad
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Bedtrick,The: Tales of Sex and Masquerad Paperback - 2005

by Doniger, Wendy

  • Used
  • Paperback

In a tour of the world of mythology and popular storytelling, the erudite and irrepressible Wendy Doniger shows the variety, danger, and allure of the "bedtrick", or what it means to wake up with a stranger. Stories are taken from the earliest record of Hindu and Hebrew texts to the latest item in "Weekly World News".

Description

2005. Paperback. UsedVeryGood.
UsedVeryGood
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Details

  • Title Bedtrick,The: Tales of Sex and Masquerad
  • Author Doniger, Wendy
  • Binding Paperback
  • Condition UsedVeryGood
  • Pages 576
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher University of Chicago Press, U.S.A.
  • Date 2005
  • Features Bibliography, Glossary, Index, Table of Contents
  • Bookseller's Inventory # 978022615643C
  • ISBN 9780226156439 / 0226156435
  • Weight 1.7 lbs (0.77 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.74 x 6.9 x 1.34 in (22.20 x 17.53 x 3.40 cm)
  • Dewey Decimal Code 291.178

First line

You go to bed with someone you think you know, and when you wake up you discover that it was someone elseanother man or another woman, or a man instead of a woman, or a woman instead of a man, or a god, or a snake, or a foreigner or alien, or a complete stranger, or your own wife or husband, or your mother or father.

From the rear cover

"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.

About the author

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. She is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was