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Is Gracie in love for the very first time? You know that bit in The X Factor, when the singer tells everyone about the rocky road they travelled to pursue their dream? Well, that's Gracie Flowers' story. Gracie is very focused for a woman of almost twenty-six. Her favourite book is 'The 5-Year Plan: Making the Most of Your Life'. And her five-year plan is going very well. That is, until she is usurped from her big promotion by a handsome, posh idiot; she is dumped by her boyfriend; and discovers her loopy mother is facing bankruptcy. Hormones awry and ice cream over-ordered, a dream Gracie thought she'd buried ten years ago starts to resurface. A dream that reminds her of the girl she used to be and everything she wanted to become.
This book is a study of female virginity loss and its representations in popular Anglophone literatures. It explores dominant cultural narratives around what makes a “good” female virginity loss experience by examining two key forms of popular literature: autobiographical virginity loss stories and popular romance fiction. In particular, this book focuses on how female sexual desire and romantic love have become entangled in the contemporary cultural imagination, leading to the emergence of a dominant paradigm which dictates that for women, sexual desire and love are and should be intrinsically linked together: something which has greatly affected cultural scripts for virginity loss. This book examines the ways in which this paradigm has been negotiated, upheld, subverted, and resisted in depictions of virginity loss in popular literatures, unpacking the romanticisation of the idea of “the right one” and “the right time”.
Proudly presenting the widely anticipated new work of fiction from the multi-award winning bestselling author of Middlesex--a #1 major bestseller in Canada--and The Marriage Plot--also an acclaimed national bestseller--and the beloved The Virgin Suicides. Featuring unseen stories from one of the most eclectic, dynamic fiction writers working today, Fresh Complaint brings together works both new and previously published--including the crème de la crème of Eugenides's beloved New Yorker stories, never before collected between two covers. Jeffrey Eugenides's bestselling novels have shown that he is an astute observer of the crises of adolescence, sexual identity, self-discovery, family love and what it means to be an American in our times. The stories in Fresh Complaint continue that tradition. Ranging from the reproductive antics of "Baster" to the wry, moving account of a young traveller's search for enlightenment in "Air Mail" (selected by Annie Proulx for The Best American Short Stories 1997), this collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national crises. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people's wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art collapse under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in "Bronze," a sexually confused college freshman whose encounter with a stranger on a train leads to a revelation about his past and his future. Narratively compelling, beautifully written and packed with a density of ideas that belie their fluid grace, Fresh Complaint proves Eugenides to be a master of the short form as well as the long. Showcasing stories from as far back as the 1980s and as recently as 2017, Fresh Complaint is the career-spanning collection from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
Scholars of film and television history as well as cultural studies will enjoy this significant volume.
Although the theme of bloodied nuptial sheets seems pervasive in western culture, its association with female virginity is uniquely tied to a brief passage in the book of Deuteronomy detailing the procedure for verifying a young woman's purity; it seldom, if ever, appears outside of Abrahamic traditions. In Signs of Virginity, Michael Rosenberg examines the history of virginity testing in Judaism and early Christianity, and the relationship of these tests to a culture that encourages male sexual violence. Deuteronomy's violent vision of virginity has held sway in Jewish and Christian circles more or less ever since. However, Rosenberg points to two authors-the rabbinic collective that produced the Babylonian Talmud and the early Christian thinker Augustine of Hippo-who, even as they perpetuate patriarchal assumptions about female virginity, nonetheless attempt to subvert the emphasis on sexual dominance bequeathed to them by Deuteronomy. Unlike the authors of earlier Rabbinic and Christian texts, who modified but fundamentally maintained and even extended the Deuteronomic ideal, the Babylonian Talmud and Augustine both construct alternative models of female virginity that, if taken seriously, would utterly reverse cultural ideals of masculinity. Indeed this vision of masculinity as fundamentally gentle, rather than characterized by brutal and violent sexual behavior, fits into a broader idealization of masculinity propagated by both authors, who reject what Augustine called a "lust for dominance" as a masculine ideal.
From Classical Antiquity to the present, virginity has been closely allied with power: as someone who chooses a life of celibacy retains mastery over his or her body. Sexual potency withheld becomes an energy-reservoir that can ensure independence and enhance self-esteem, but it can also be harnessed by public institutions and redirected for the common good. This was the founding principle of the Vestal Virgins of Rome and later in the monastic orders of the middle ages. Mythical accounts of goddesses and heroines who possessed the ability to recover their virginity after sexual experience demonstrate a belief that virginity is paradoxically connected both with social autonomy and the ability to serve the human community. Virginity Revisited is a collection of essays that examines virginity not as a physical reality but as a cultural artefact. By situating the topic of virginity within a range of historical 'moments' and using a variety of methodologies, Virginity Revisited illuminates how chastity provided a certain agency, autonomy, and power to women. This is a study of the positive and negative features of sexual renunciation, from ancient Greek divinities and mythical women, in Rome's Vestal Virgins, in the Christian martyrs and Mariology in the Medieval and early Modern period, and in Grace Marks, the heroine of Margaret Atwood's novel Alias Grace.
Adultery, though not an umbrella concept for all the sexual prohibitions in the Hebrew Bible, enjoys a certain pride of place. Remarkably, it is the one sexual prohibition attested in all biblical genres, which makes it very representative in the Hebrew Bible. It is the only Hebrew biblical sexual prohibition explicitly mentioned in the Decalogue. A solid understanding of Hebrew biblical adultery, therefore, is an important step towards grasping the vital role of human sexuality in the Hebrew Bible, both in terms of inter-human relationships and the relationship between the human and the divine. Without prejudice to the contents of the Hebrew biblical lexicons and theological dictionaries, this work aims at providing a comprehensive understanding of adultery in the Hebrew Bible: its meaning, punishments and the implications thereof. Among others, it corrects some wrong assumptions about the concept of adultery in the Hebrew Bible, and provides a balanced and unbiased Hebrew biblical conception of adultery and the implications thereof for todays couples.