Innovations and Turning Points: Toward a History of Kavya Literature

This book is not a history of Sanskrit kavya. Nor does it address all moments of the truly conceptual innovations in this tradition. What it offers is a series of pilot studies, sometimes the first serious interpretative essays, on many works – which, roughly arranged in a chronological sequence, highlight structural, stylistic, thematic, and generic breakthroughs. Some of the essays present wide-angle panoramas of the evolution of parallel traditions that interacted creatively with Sanskrit literary models – for example, classical Javanese Kakawin, Tibetan Kavyas, and early modern poetry in Brajbhasha. Within this rather polyphonic chorus, representing voices from nearly two millennia in large parts of Asia, fragments of central narrative are manifest nonetheless.