Fictions of Pleasure

Author: Alistaire Tallent
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1644533251
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 142

Book Description
Out of the libertine literary tradition of eighteenth-century France emerged over a dozen memoir novels of female libertines who eagerly take up sex work as a means of escape from the patriarchal control of fathers and husbands to pursue pleasure, wealth, and personal independence outside the private, domestic sphere. In these anonymously published novels, the heroines proudly declare themselves prostitutes, or putains, and use the desire they arouse, the professional skills they develop, and the network of female friends they create to exploit, humiliate, and financially ruin wealthy and powerful men. In pursuing their desires, the putains challenge contemporary notions of womanhood and expose the injustices of ancien-régime France. Until the French Revolution spelled the end of the genre, these novels proposed not only an appealing libertine utopia in which libertine women enjoy the same benefits as their male counterparts but also entirely new ways of looking at systems of power, gender, and sexuality.

Red, White & Royal Blue

Author: Casey McQuiston
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 1250316782
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Book Description
* Instant NEW YORK TIMES and USA TODAY bestseller * * GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD WINNER for BEST DEBUT and BEST ROMANCE of 2019 * * BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR* for VOGUE, NPR, VANITY FAIR, and more! * What happens when America's First Son falls in love with the Prince of Wales? When his mother became President, Alex Claremont-Diaz was promptly cast as the American equivalent of a young royal. Handsome, charismatic, genius—his image is pure millennial-marketing gold for the White House. There's only one problem: Alex has a beef with the actual prince, Henry, across the pond. And when the tabloids get hold of a photo involving an Alex-Henry altercation, U.S./British relations take a turn for the worse. Heads of family, state, and other handlers devise a plan for damage control: staging a truce between the two rivals. What at first begins as a fake, Instragramable friendship grows deeper, and more dangerous, than either Alex or Henry could have imagined. Soon Alex finds himself hurtling into a secret romance with a surprisingly unstuffy Henry that could derail the campaign and upend two nations and begs the question: Can love save the world after all? Where do we find the courage, and the power, to be the people we are meant to be? And how can we learn to let our true colors shine through? Casey McQuiston's Red, White & Royal Blue proves: true love isn't always diplomatic. "I took this with me wherever I went and stole every second I had to read! Absorbing, hilarious, tender, sexy—this book had everything I crave. I’m jealous of all the readers out there who still get to experience Red, White & Royal Blue for the first time!" - Christina Lauren, New York Times bestselling author of The Unhoneymooners "Red, White & Royal Blue is outrageously fun. It is romantic, sexy, witty, and thrilling. I loved every second." - Taylor Jenkins Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Daisy Jones & The Six

Write Your Own Pleasure Prescription

Author: Paul Pearsall
Publisher: Hunter House
ISBN: 9780897932295
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
Offers sixty suggestions for bringing back small, everyday pleasures intone's life to restore it's balance, and describes the five Polynesian keys to happy life.

The Pleasure Trap

Author: Douglas J. Lisle
Publisher: Book Publishing Company
ISBN: 1570679975
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Book Description
The authors offer unique insights into the factors that make us susceptible to dietary and lifestyle excesses, and present ways to restore the biological processes designed by nature to keep us running at maximum efficiency and vitality. A wake-up call to even the most health conscious people, The Pleasure Trap boldy challenges conventional wisdom about sickness and unhappiness in today's contemporary culture, and offers groundbreaking solutions for achieving change. Authors Douglas Lisel, Ph.D., and Alan Goldhamer, D.C., provide a fascinating new perspective on how modern life can turn so many smart, savvy people into the unwitting saboteurs of their own well-being. Inspired by stunning original research, comprehensive clinical studies, and their successes with thousands of patients, the authors construct a new paradigm for the psychology of health, offering fresh hope for anyone stuck in a self-destructive rut. Integrating principals of evolutionary biology with trailblazing, proactive strategies for well

Enlightened Pleasures

Author: Thomas M. Kavanagh
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300162855
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
"Novelists, artists, and philosophers of the eighteenth century understood pleasure as a virtue - a gift to be shared with one's companion, with a reader, or with the public. In this daring new book, Thomas Kavanagh overturns the prevailing scholarly tradition that views eighteenth-century France primarily as the incubator of the Revolution. Instead, Kavanagh demonstrates how the art and literature of the era put the experience of pleasure at the center of the cultural agenda, leading to advances in both ethics and aesthetics."--Publisher's description.

JOY

Author: Etsuko
Publisher: Kodansha America LLC
ISBN: 1684912008
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Book Description
Goh Akazaki is a 26-year-old man...who happens to be a shojo manga artist. His assistant is Yusuke Akune, who happens to be a mangaka in his own right. But when Goh accidentally finds out that Yusuke is gay, he's thrown for a loop—what else about his friend doesn't he know? And when Goh is asked to draw BL, he tries to pry into Yusuke's experiences for inspiration...but when he is ultimately inspired by the idea of "unrequited love for Yusuke," can he keep his own feelings out of the mix?

Happiness

Author: Darrin M. McMahon
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802142894
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 572

Book Description
An intellectual history of man's most elusive yet coveted goal. Today, we think of happiness as a natural right, but people haven't always felt this way. Historian McMahon argues that our modern belief in happiness is a recent development, the product of a revolution in human expectations carried out since the eighteenth century. He investigates that fundamental transformation by synthesizing two thousand years of politics, culture, and thought. In ancient Greek tragedy, happiness was considered a gift of the gods. During the Enlightenment men and women were first introduced to the novel prospect that they could--in fact should--be happy in this life as opposed to the hereafter. This recognition of happiness as a motivating ideal led to its consecration in the Declaration of Independence. McMahon then shows how our modern search continues to generate new forms of pleasure, but also, paradoxically, new forms of pain.--From publisher description.

Biodeconstruction

Author: Francesco Vitale
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438468857
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
Analyzes Derridas 1975 seminar La vie la mort as a deconstruction of biology with relevance to his work more broadly. In Biodeconstruction,Francesco Vitale demonstrates the key role that the question of life plays in Jacques Derridas work. In the seminar La vie la mort (1975), Derrida engages closely with the life sciences, especially biology and evolution theory. Connecting this line of thought to his analysis of cybernetics in Of Grammatology, Vitale shows how Derrida develops a notion of biological life as itself a sort of text that is necessarily open onto further articulations and grafts. This sets the stage for the deconstruction of the traditional opposition between life and death, conceiving of death as an internal condition of the constitution of the living rather than being the opposite of life. It also provides the basis for the deconstruction of the rigidly deterministic concept of the genetic program, an insight that anticipates recent achievements of biological research in epigenetics and sexual reproduction. Finally, Vitaleargues that this framework can enrich our understanding of Derridas late work devoted to political issues, connecting his use of the autoimmunitarian lexicon to the theory of cellular suicide in biology. This book is extremely interesting and engaging, and provides a very original and timely perspective on Derridas work. Its greatest strength is bringing together Derridas deconstruction in his analysis of the life sciences under the heading of biodeconstruction. This term is simple but ingenious, and captures beautifully the material dimension of Derridas work. Nicole Anderson, author of Derrida: Ethics Under Erasure

The Pursuit of Human Well-Being

Author: Richard J. Estes
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319391011
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 829

Book Description
This handbook informs the reader about how much progress we, the human race, have made in enhancing the quality of life on this planet. Many skeptics focus on how the quality of life has deteriorated over the course of human history, particularly given World War II and its aftermath. This handbook provides a positive perspective on the history of well-being. Quality of life, as documented by scientists worldwide, has significantly improved. Nevertheless, one sees more improvements in well-being in some regions of the world than in others. Why? This handbook documents the progress of well-being in the various world regions as well as the differences in those regions. The broad questions that the handbook addresses include: What does well-being mean? How do different philosophical and religious traditions interpret the concept of well-being within their own context? Has well-being remained the same over different historical epochs and for different regions and subregions of the world? In which areas of human development have we been most successful in advancing individual and collective well-being? In which sectors has the attainment of well-being proven most difficult? How does well-being differ within and between different populations groups that, for a variety of socially created reasons, have been the most disadvantaged (e.g., children, the aged, women, the poor, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities)?

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

Author: Clarice Lispector
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811230678
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 150

Book Description
Now in paperback, a romantic love story by the great Brazilian writer Lóri, a primary school teacher, is isolated and nervous, comfortable with children but unable to connect to adults. When she meets Ulisses, a professor of philosophy, an opportunity opens: a chance to escape the shipwreck of introspection and embrace the love, including the sexual love, of a man. Her attempt, as Sheila Heti writes in her afterword, is not only “to love and to be loved,” but also “to be worthy of life itself.” Published in 1968, An Apprenticeship is Clarice Lispector’s attempt to reinvent herself following the exhausting effort of her metaphysical masterpiece The Passion According to G. H. Here, in this unconventional love story, she explores the ways in which people try to bridge the gaps between them, and the result, unusual in her work, surprised many readers and became a bestseller. Some appreciated its accessibility; others denounced it as sexist or superficial. To both admirers and critics, the olympian Clarice gave a typically elliptical answer: “I humanized myself,” she said. “The book reflects that.”