In this Book
University of California Press
- Into the Twilight of Sanskrit Court Poetry: The Sena Salon of Bengal and Beyond
- Book
- 2014
- Published by: University of California Press
summary
At the turn of the twelfth-century into the thirteenth, at the court of King Laksmanasena of Bengal, Sanskrit poetry showed profound and sudden changes: a new social scope made its definitive entrance into high literature. Courtly and pastoral, rural and urban, cosmopolitan and vernacular, confronted each other in a commingling of high and low styles. A literary salon in what is now Bangladesh, at the eastern extreme of the nexus of regional courtly cultures that defined the age, seems to have implicitly reformulated its entire literary system in the context of the imminent breakdown of the old courtly world, as Turkish power expanded and redefined the landscape. Through close readings of a little known corpus of texts from eastern India, this ambitious book demonstrates how a local and rural sensibility came to infuse the cosmopolitan language of Sanskrit, creating a regional literary idiom founded on a cosmopolitan-local dialectic that would define the emergence of the Bengali language and its literary traditions; in intimate relationship to both courtly Sanskrit and some kind of uncanny otherness.
Table of Contents
Additional Information
ISBN
9780520957794
Related ISBN(s)
9780520282056
MARC Record
OCLC
871860617
Pages
217
Launched on MUSE
2014-05-16
Language
English
Open Access
No