Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India - cover image

Copyright

Francesca Orsini; Katherine Butler Schofield; Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapters’ authors.

Published On

2015-10-05

ISBN

Paperback978-1-78374-102-1
Hardback978-1-78374-103-8
PDF978-1-78374-104-5
HTML978-1-80064-489-2
XML978-1-78374-641-5
EPUB978-1-78374-105-2
MOBI978-1-78374-106-9

Language

  • English

Print Length

566 pages (xx + 546)

Dimensions

Paperback156 x 29 x 234 mm(6.14" x 1.15" x 9.21")
Hardback156 x 32 x 234 mm(6.14" x 1.25" x 9.21")

Weight

Paperback1729g (60.99oz)
Hardback2129g (75.10oz)

Media

Illustrations11

OCLC Number

993949330

LCCN

2019467888

BIC

  • DS
  • HBTB
  • 1FM

BISAC

  • LIT008020
  • PER019000
  • SOC002010

LCC

  • GR72.3

Keywords

  • North India
  • Pakistan
  • storytelling
  • oral performances
  • texts
  • improvisation
  • social identity

Tellings and Texts

Music, Literature and Performance in North India

Examining materials from early modern and contemporary North India and Pakistan, Tellings and Texts brings together seventeen first-rate papers on the relations between written and oral texts, their performance, and the musical traditions these performances have entailed. The contributions from some of the best scholars in the field cover a wide range of literary genres and social and cultural contexts across the region.
The texts and practices are contextualized in relation to the broader social and political background in which they emerged, showing how religious affiliations, caste dynamics and political concerns played a role in shaping social identities as well as aesthetic sensibilities. By doing so this book sheds light into theoretical issues of more general significance, such as textual versus oral norms; the features of oral performance and improvisation; the role of the text in performance; the aesthetics and social dimension of performance; the significance of space in performance history and important considerations on repertoires of story-telling.
Tellings and Texts is essential reading for anyone with an interest in South Asian culture and, more generally, in the theory and practice of oral literature, performance and story-telling.

Endorsements

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.

Daniel Gold

Professor of South-Asian Religions, Cornell University

Contents

  • Monika Horstmann
  • John Stratton Hawley
  • Allyn Miner
  • Katherine Butler Schofield

Introduction

(pp. 1–28)
  • Francesca Orsini
  • Katherine Butler Schofield

Contributors

Francesca Orsini

(editor)
Professor of Hindi and South Asian Literature at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London

Katherine Butler Schofield

(editor)