The Implied Spider, Updated with a New Preface: Politics and Theology in Myth

Wendy Doniger

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Paper, 256 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-15642-4
$28.00 / £19.50

Updated with a new Preface
December, 2010
Cloth, 256 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-15641-7
$85.00 / £58.50

Wendy Doniger's foundational study is both modern in its engagement with a diverse range of religions and refreshingly classic in its transhistorical, cross-cultural approach. By responsibly analyzing patterns and themes across context, Doniger reinvigorates the comparative reading of religion, tapping into a wealth of narrative traditions, from the instructive tales of Judaism and Christianity to the moral lessons of the Bhagavad Gita. She extracts political meaning from a variety of texts while respecting the original ideas of each. A new preface confronts the difficulty of contextualizing the comparison of religions as well as controversies over choosing subjects and positioning arguments, and the text itself is expanded and updated throughout.

Related Subjects

• Comparative Religion

Series

• American Lectures on the History of Religions

About the Author

Wendy Doniger is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. She is also a professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and a member of the university's Committee on Social Thought. Her books include Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities; Other Peoples' Myths: The Cave of Echoes, and The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade.

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