If All the World Were Paper : a History of Writing in Hindi /
Williams, Tyler Walker,
If All the World Were Paper : a History of Writing in Hindi / Tyler W. Williams. - New York : Columbia University Press, 2024. - 308 pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Prologue: Into the archive -- Introduction: Writing a history of writing in the vernacular -- Storytellers and storybooks -- Saints, singers, and songbooks -- Pothīs, pandits, and princes -- The guru's voice and the sacred book -- Conclusion: Building an archive for Hindi.
"Tyler W. Williams puts questions of materiality, circulation, and performance at the center of his investigation into how literature comes to be defined and produced within a language, specifically, premodern Hindi. Williams proposes new methods for working with written text artifacts and a new approach to theorizing and writing Hindi literary history. He responds to recent developments in quantitative and qualitative approaches to book history - including tools developed within the digital humanities - by applying new as well as traditional techniques of paleography, codicology, and bibliography to handwritten copies of romances, epics, songbooks, treatises, and scriptures. To make the book more accessible and enjoyable for cross-disciplinary readers, Williams bookends (so to speak) each chapter with the story of a specific artifact - an ascetic's notebook, a Mughal general's storybook, a pandit's textbook, or a guru's copy of a sacred scripture - in order to pose and then apply the questions about writing, textuality, and performance that the chapter addresses. By combining distant and close reading that is mindful of the materiality of these manuscripts, Tyler reveals literary, intellectual, and religious practices that we would otherwise be unable to see"--
9780231211123 9780231211130
2024009700
Hindi literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc.--To 1500
Hindi literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc.--1500-1800
Hindi literature--Manuscripts.
Material culture in literature.
Literary criticism.
PK2035 / .W55 2024
891.4/309
If All the World Were Paper : a History of Writing in Hindi / Tyler W. Williams. - New York : Columbia University Press, 2024. - 308 pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Prologue: Into the archive -- Introduction: Writing a history of writing in the vernacular -- Storytellers and storybooks -- Saints, singers, and songbooks -- Pothīs, pandits, and princes -- The guru's voice and the sacred book -- Conclusion: Building an archive for Hindi.
"Tyler W. Williams puts questions of materiality, circulation, and performance at the center of his investigation into how literature comes to be defined and produced within a language, specifically, premodern Hindi. Williams proposes new methods for working with written text artifacts and a new approach to theorizing and writing Hindi literary history. He responds to recent developments in quantitative and qualitative approaches to book history - including tools developed within the digital humanities - by applying new as well as traditional techniques of paleography, codicology, and bibliography to handwritten copies of romances, epics, songbooks, treatises, and scriptures. To make the book more accessible and enjoyable for cross-disciplinary readers, Williams bookends (so to speak) each chapter with the story of a specific artifact - an ascetic's notebook, a Mughal general's storybook, a pandit's textbook, or a guru's copy of a sacred scripture - in order to pose and then apply the questions about writing, textuality, and performance that the chapter addresses. By combining distant and close reading that is mindful of the materiality of these manuscripts, Tyler reveals literary, intellectual, and religious practices that we would otherwise be unable to see"--
9780231211123 9780231211130
2024009700
Hindi literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc.--To 1500
Hindi literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc.--1500-1800
Hindi literature--Manuscripts.
Material culture in literature.
Literary criticism.
PK2035 / .W55 2024
891.4/309