Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thibaut d'Hubert
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Bay Of Bengal ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Fragmented Landscape ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Bengali Literature

The introduction opens with a reflection on the relative marginality of the kingdom of Arakan and what it entailed in terms of historiography. I observe a reconfiguration of cosmographical imaginaries around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that conditioned the formation of vernacular literary traditions in eastern South Asia and around the Bay of Bengal. Then I provide a brief overview of the Bengali poet Ālāol’s life and works and discuss what the study of his poetics brings to our knowledge of Middle Bengali literature. I highlight the fragmented landscape of Middle Bengali literary production and the need to study Middle Bengali poems as literary texts and not only as sources for social or religious history. The last section of the introduction provides an overview of the contents of the book.

Bengali Literature of Arakan

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thibaut d'Hubert
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Bay Of Bengal ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Literary History ◽  
North India ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Bengali Literature ◽  
Cultural Domain ◽  
Urban And Rural Areas

Between the 16th and the 18th centuries, Middle Bengali became a major idiom of literary expression in the kingdom of Arakan. It is within the domain of this coastal kingdom, which then comprised the region of Chittagong in today’s Bangladesh, that Muslim subjects of the Buddhist kings started using the courtly vernacular that was previously cultivated by Hindu dignitaries of the Ḥusayn Shāhī sultans of Bengal. By the mid-17th century, which constituted a moment of economic prosperity and maximum territorial expansion, all genres of Middle Bengali poetry were represented in the corpus of texts written by authors living in the urban and rural areas of the kingdom. The many treatises on Muslim beliefs and meditative practices, the hagiographic literature, and the courtly romances testify to the formation of a local Islamic cultural ethos. After the Mughal conquest of Chittagong in 1666, local literacy was still cultivating standards set by authors of the Arakanese period such as Saiẏad Sultān and Ālāol. In Arakan itself, Bengali Muslim literature continued to be produced and transmitted until at least the first half of the twentieth century. A large number of manuscripts was collected in the first decades of the twentieth century and these are preserved in various institutions in Bangladesh. The Bengali literature of Arakan is characterized by its Indic religious idiom and Sanskritized poetics, but also by its complex intertextuality that reflects the region’s connections with north India and the Persianate trading networks of the Bay of Bengal. Up to the 2000s, the Bengali literature of Arakan has mostly been discussed within the framework of the national literary history of Bangladesh, but subsequently scholars have relocated this corpus within the cultural domain of the Bay of Bengal and the Islamicate literary traditions of South and Southeast Asia.

Katherine Mansfield and Translation

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Specific Interest ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Key Features ◽  
Critical Interest

Our understanding of Anglophone modernism has been transformed by recent critical interest in translation. The central place of translation in the circulation of aesthetic and political ideas in the early twentieth century has been underlined, for example, as well as translation’s place in the creative and poetic dynamics of key modernist texts. This volume of Katherine Mansfield Studies offers a timely assessment of Mansfield’s place in such exchanges. As a reviewer, she developed a specific interest in literatures in translation, as well as showing a keen awareness of the translator’s presence in the text. Throughout her life, Mansfield engaged with new literary texts through translation, either translating proficiently herself, or working alongside a co-translator to explore the semantic and stylistic challenges of partially known languages. The metaphorical resonances of translating, transition and marginality also remain key features of her writing throughout her life. Meanwhile, her enduring popularity abroad is ensured by translations of her works, all of which reveal sociological and even ideological agendas of their own, an inevitable reflection of individual translators’ readings of her works, and the literary traditions of the new country and language of reception. The contributions to this volume refine and extend our appreciation of her specifically trans-linguistic and trans-literary lives. They illuminate the specific and more general influences of translation on Mansfield’s evolving technique and, jointly, they reveal the importance of translation on her literary language, as well as for her own particular brand of modernism.

Economies of Prestige and the Editorial Program Era: Literary Sociology and Tim Groenland's The Art of Editing

2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 502-507
Author(s):  
DANIEL ROBERT KING
Keyword(s):  
History Of The Book ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Turn Of The Millennium ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Literary Marketplace ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Sociology ◽  
Significant Figures ◽  
Sociological Studies

Tim Groenland's The Art of Editing is an exciting new addition to the field of literary sociology, making a valuable contribution to a discipline which has seen a resurgence since the turn of the millennium. In his seminal early work in the field, John Sutherland traces the origins of this kind of publishing history to Robert Escarpit's Sociology of Literature (1958), which he describes as the beginning of “modern, serious work” in considering the effects of the literary marketplace on the fiction of a particular era. However, it is the first two decades of the twenty-first century that have seen the most significant growth in sociological studies of literary production, a trend that Alan Liu calls “the resurgent history of the book.” This is a “resurgence” that Liu argues has resulted in “restoring to view … vital nodes in the circuit” of literary production, including “editors, publishers, translators, booksellers,” and many others. This recent growth in scholarly interest in the production and circulation of literary texts includes other significant figures such as James F. English, Mark McGurl, John B. Thompson, Loren Glass, Paul Crosthwaite, and David D. Hall.

Inszenierungsspiele

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alina Boy
Keyword(s):  
Literary Texts ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Public Persona

Franziska zu Reventlow’s novels have long been received as autobiographical references to her ‘scandalous’ life. Focusing instead on the narrative strategies and intermedial structure of her work, this study foregrounds Reventlow’s ironic deconstruction of cultural and literary traditions as well as her own public persona. The authorial myth surrounding Reventlow’s work and persona is explored as the effect of complex interplay between her self-fashioning and literary texts.

Devotion as Rasa

2019 ◽  
pp. 231-264
Author(s):  
Hamsa Stainton
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Important Center ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship

In addition to being an important center for religious innovation and literary production, Kashmir was also the site of major developments in aesthetics from the end of the eighth century onward. After reviewing this history, this chapter considers how Kashmirian poets adopted and adapted language and ideas from aesthetics—particularly the language of rasa—in unusual and creative ways. It focuses on the idea of bhaktirasa, the “taste” or experience of devotion. Notably, many Kashmirian explorations of bhaktirasa occurred long before Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava authors would make bhaktirasa well known in South Asia. This chapter argues that the Śaiva hymns of Kashmir represent earlier reflections on the aesthetic dimensions of devotion that can contribute to our understanding of the relationship between aesthetics and religion in South Asia.

Lessons in Reading and Ideology

2019 ◽  
pp. 35-50
Author(s):  
Andrej Petrovic
Keyword(s):  
Literary Texts ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Widespread Distribution ◽  
School Contexts ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
The Third

Chapter 3 explores the transmission of Greek epigrams outside poetic books, that is, in compilations of texts designed to satisfy an individual’s needs and not for widespread distribution. Therefore the chapter analyses in particular the papyri with selections of and excerpts from literary texts assembled for a use on specific occasions and following personal tastes, collections used in school contexts, as well as ostraca and templates for stonemasons. The chapter detects in such Hellenistic ‘paraliterary’ contexts resonances of contemporary literary production and argues that already in the third century BCE school anthologies trained young readers in the sequential reading of epigrams and served as a means of disseminating Ptolemaic ideology.

The Chinese in West Indian Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne-Marie Lee-Loy
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
West Indies ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
West Indians ◽  
The West ◽  
Indian Identity ◽  
Literary Landscapes ◽  
Marginal Status

Asians in the West Indies are primarily migrants and their descendants from either South Asia or China. The representation of the Chinese in West Indian fiction is integrally connected to the specific development of the region. Indeed, to consider the role that the Chinese play in West Indian fiction is to engage, more generally, in the act of imaginatively locating the West Indies. Despite the fact that numerically, they have always held a marginal status in the region, the Chinese are very much present in West Indian literary landscapes. The recurring representations of the Chinese and Chineseness in such fiction are intimately tied to locating the metaphorical and discursive contours of the West Indies and of West Indians. In this context, depictions of the Chinese in West Indian literary texts tend to follow three lines of representation: (1) defining the region as an exotic “other place”; (2) negotiating the boundaries of West Indian belonging; and (3) complicating settled narratives of West Indian identity.

Pahlavi

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlo Cereti
Keyword(s):  
Tenth Century ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Islamic Culture ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Literary Traditions

This chapter offers an overview of Pahlavi literature. It surveys a wide variety of genres and texts, which were composed in the form that has reached us mainly in the ninth and tenth century, though some of the works and many of the themes date back to the Sasanian period and even earlier. Much of this literature was composed by Zoroastrians in Iran, and the chapter looks at the Zoroastrian contexts of literary production. Important texts such as the Dēnkard and the Bundahišn are discussed at length. The chapter also examines non-religious literature and other literary traditions with which Pahlavi authors came into contact. No doubt a large part of Sasanian non-religious literature was translated into Arabic and later also into Persian, contributing to the blossoming of Islamic culture.

Language Policy in South Asia

1981 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 60-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Braj B. Kachru
Keyword(s):  
Language Policy ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
National Language ◽  
Basic Knowledge ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Political ◽  
Language Policies ◽  
The Status ◽  
Regional Languages

In the political divisions within South Asia there has traditionally been no organized effort for language policies.1 Language was essentially related to one's caste, village, district, and state. Beyond this, one identified with languages associated with religion (Sanskrit or Arabic), or learned and literary texts (mainly Sanskrit and Persian). At the time of Indian independence (1947), one task of the new government was to unravel the status and position of almost 560 sovereign states which were ruled by an array of mahārājās, nawābs, and lesser luminaries, depending on the size and the revenue of each state and subdivision. Each state state was a kindgom unto itself, and such political divisions did not foster a national language policy. In India, the largest country in South Asia, four languages were used for wider communication as bazār languages or languages of literature and intranational communication: Hindi (and its varieties, Hindustani and Urdu), Sanskrit, Persian, and later, English (cf., for Sanskrit, Kachru and Sridhar 1978; Sharma 1976; for English, Kachru 1969; 1982a). The Hindus tended to send their children to a pāṭhśālā (traditional Hindu school mainly for scriptural education) for the study of the scriptures and some basic knowledge of the śāastras (Sanskrit instructional texts, treatise), and the Muslims tended to send their children to a maktab (traditional school for Koranic instruction). The denominational schools (vidyāZaya) provided liberal arts instruction in Sanskrit, Persian, Hindi, Arabic, or in the regional languages.

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