Tellings and Texts

A good deal of the work on literature in the North Indian vernaculars over the last decades has been, perhaps out of necessity, somewhat narrowly philological. This volume, however, marks a new stage of collective development in the field. Any scholar interested in current directions in South Asian humanities should find the papers exciting. Tellings and Texts, however, is much more than the sum of its parts. Indeed, it is hard to express how well put-together this volume is. Much too often edited books even on a fairly well-defined topic consist of separate chapters that appear mostly independent of one another, with section divisions that seem somewhat forced and not particularly coherent. This volume, by contrast, really does read as a well-executed whole, with the papers referencing one another generously and a progression from one nicely conceived section to the next.