Preface: My Family Jewels, and Other Tall Tales
Introduction: The Signifying Ring
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Marriage Rings (and Adultery Rings)
Chapter 2: The Ring Fished from the Ocean
Chapter 3: Shakuntala and the Ring of Memory
Chapter 4: Rings of Forgetfulness in Medieval European Romances
Chapter 5: Siegfried's Ring and Wagner's Ring
Chapter 6: Pregnant Riddles and Clever Wives
Chapter 7: The Rape of the Clever Wife
Chapter 8: The Affair of the Diamond Necklace
Chapter 9: The Slut Assumption in the Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries
Chapter 10: Are Diamonds A Woman's Best Friend?
Chapter 11: Two Conclusions, on Money and Myth
Wendy Doniger is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago and the author of over 40 books, including On Hinduism and Redeeming the Kamasutra.
"Doniger's exploration of the ring's symbolism as a manacle that
binds a woman to a man is particularly insightful, as is her witty
deconstruction of the modern myth of the diamond engagement ring
that proves to have much more to do with savvy marketing than any
enduring romantic tradition."--Library Journal
"Reading Wendy Doniger's book is not unlike reading Don Quixote,
with all its familiar adventures peppered with memorable detours of
love, adultery, and the foibles of jealous husbands and clever
wives. She leaps easily from Sanskrit fables to Roman times, from
medieval lore to the eighteenth-century French Court and modern
Doris Day movies, landing wherever she wishes with her
characteristic supreme knowledge of 'anytime and anywhere' and
her
contagious preoccupation with Sex."--Francis Ford Coppola
"Only a great scholar like Wendy Doniger could bring together
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Siegfried, Shakuntala and Marie
Antoinette, Solomon and Shakespeare and so many others with such
ease and lucidity in an endlessly mesmerizing ring."--Robert
Calasso, author of Ardor
"Why did I read this book, so passionately glued to it, hardly
taking a break? The tales and the connections, the inner working of
the layers of each tale kept working on my mind and my body. Wonder
and amazement were the determining qualities of the book. I never
stopped wondering what the next sentence would say, and the next
tale would tell."--Velcheru Narayana Rao, Visweswara Rao and Sita
Koppaka Chair in Telugu Culture, Literature, and History, Emory
University
"Doniger has the uncanny ability to delight and teach at the same
time. Her whimsical approach to complicated material causes
scholars to marvel and nonspecialists to be entranced....This
wonderful book reads like a true modern best seller as well as a
thoughtful, scholarly endeavor."--CHOICE
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