Tradition and Terrain is an attempt to map out the emergence of an aesthetic awareness in terms of the land, region and creative consciousness. The essays trace the presence of adbhuta rasa as an the aesthic of wonder, formulate a critique of ceremony, and reach beyond the phenomenal into the innermost possibilities of ecological wisdom and alter/native discourses, even while reconstructing a poetics of bhakti in the context of India tradition. Although written variously in diverse contexts and situations these essays evidence the manifold concerns of the Indian creative/critical psyche. As a cultural past is resuscitated through individual texts as well as collective efforts through different genres and categories, what emerges still continues to share a relevance and positive edge while remaining imaginatively powerful and creatively fertile. This book is bound to be of interest both to the casual reader and the academic scholar. These essays have been published earlier in: Chandrabhaga, Literary Criterion, Pondicherry university Studies in Humanities and Social Science, Literary Half-Yearly, Indian Literature, LittCrit, revaluations, Samyukta, and Summerhill.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR S. Murali
S. Murali is a poet, painter and critic-a specialist in Indian aesthetics. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Kerala (1990) and is a scholar of repute deeply concerned with indigenous values and essential issues. His book The Mantra of Vision: An Overview of Sri Aurobindo's Aesthetics (1997) has come to be recognised as a valuable contribution to the study of Indian poetics and comparative aesthetics. He has also authored a collection of poems and sketches-Night Heron (1998). He is a well known painter and his works have gone on display at several exhibitions in India and abroad. His publications include poems, translations and essays on art, literature and ideas in journals of international repute. He has as much involvement with nature and environment as with poetry and painting. At present Dr. Murali and painting. At present Dr. Murali teaches in the Department of English, University College, Trivandrum, Kerala.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Usha V.T.
Dr. Usha V.T, critic and theorist, is reader and Coordinator of the Center for Women’s Studies, Pondicherry University, Pondicherry. She has authored a number of articles on issues relating to women and ideology and also a book on the twentieth century British poet Ted Hughes –The real and the Imagined (1998). She is the co-author of figuring the female: Women’s Discourse, Art and Literature (2006).
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