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How and when did the kiss become a vital sign of romance and love? In this wide-ranging book, pop culture expert Marcel Danesi takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the history of the kiss, from poetry and painting to movies and popular songs, and argues that its romantic incarnation signaled the birth of popular culture.
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This book corrects the long-standing misconceptions of the masses about the religious beliefs of Islam, and challenges the core social perceptions and deviations from its religious guidelines. It offers the reader an opportunity to learn about the various social dimensions and Islamic views in the light of the Quran and Sunnah. The book will appeal to a diverse readership, and rarely uses terminology which is specific to a certain subject. Where such terms are used and inevitable, these are properly defined and explained in the given context.
Winner of the 2013 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize Best Bones is a house. When you walk around the rooms of the house, you overhear the desires and griefs of a family, as well as the unresolved concerns of lingering ghosts. The various voices in the house struggle against the family roles and social identities that they must wear like heavy garments—mother, father, wife, husband, sister, brother, servant, and master. All these voices crave unification; they want to join themselves into one whole sentient being, into "a mansion steering itself." The poems in Best Bones also explore the experience of living in a physical body, and how the natural world intersects with manmade landscapes and technologies. In it, mother has a reset button, servants blend into the furniture, and a doctor patiently oversees the pregnancy of the earth. In these poems, the body is a working machine, a repository of childhood myth and archetype, and a window to the spiritual world. The poems strive to be visceral on the level of dream, or of a story that is half remembered and half fabricated.
Taking Plato's Myth of the Cave as its starting point, this study traces the archetype of the cave back to its origins in Homer and forward through the ages to Ariosto. The symbolism of the Cave is multi-faceted and complex, and together with its ramifications it forms a metaphoric field that remains relatively stable during Antiquity, changing radically in some respects as the Western world shifts from polytheism to Christianity. In all contexts and times the cave remains a symbol of unformed or unrefined material being, whether viewed as man's animal nature, or as Mother Earth herself. Although generally seen as a prison or lowly state of being, it can be seductive, nurturing, a source of healing, wisdom, or inspiration. All Western myths present man as earthborn, formed of clay by Prometheus or by the Creator in Genesis; in the end, he returns to the earthy womb/tomb of his origin.