An Alaṅkāra Reader: Classical Indian Poetics with Yigal Bronner (Columbia UP, 2026)

Podcast: New Books in South Asian Studies · New Books Network

Opublikowano: 2026-10-15

Classical Indian poetics prized the skillful use of alaṅkāras, or “ornaments”—literary figures of speech. Across more than a millennium, Sanskrit writers developed and elaborated an account of literary embellishment that is perhaps the world’s most complex and long-standing theory of figuration. Yet it remains the least studied of India’s major classical systems of thought. An Alaṅkāra Reader (Columbia University Press, 2026) is a groundbreaking panoramic overview of this tradition, presenting extensive and accessible translations of key works that span its history, from the sixth to eighteenth century CE. These texts vividly show how Indian...