TY - BOOK AU - Williams,Tyler Walker TI - If All the World Were Paper: a History of Writing in Hindi SN - 9780231211123 AV - PK2035 .W55 2024 U1 - 891.4/309 23/eng/20240325 PY - 2024/// CY - New York PB - Columbia University Press KW - Hindi literature KW - To 1500 KW - History and criticism KW - Theory, etc KW - 1500-1800 KW - Manuscripts KW - Material culture in literature KW - Literary criticism KW - lcgft N1 - 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 N2 - "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"-- ER -