Description
Book SynopsisArgument and Design features fifteen essays by leading scholars of the Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa, discussing the Mahābhārata’s upākhyānas, subtales that branch off from the central storyline and provide vantage points for reflecting on it. Contributors include: Vishwa Adluri, Joydeep Bagchee, Greg Bailey, Adam Bowles, Simon Brodbeck, Nicolas Dejenne, Sally J. Sutherland Goldman, Robert P. Goldman, Alf Hiltebeitel, Thennilapuram Mahadevan, Adheesh Sathaye, Bruce M. Sullivan, and Fernando Wulff Alonso.
Trade Review'This is not just one among numerous books written on the Mahābhārata, but a fresh scholarly look at some controversies about the epic, leading to some definite conclusions.(...) This volume could be seen as the beginning of approaching the Mahābhārata from the perspective of the upākhyāna and “a new way of navigating the epic, using not the so-called heroic epic as our guide but the epic’s own musings about itself and its characters, provided self-reflexively via its narration of its upākhyānas”. (...) With fourteen chapters on a wide range of topics—from the connection of Rāmāyaṇa’s Uttarakāṇda to the Mahābhārata to the depictions of some Mahābhārata’s characters—Argument and Design is a welcome relief from the existing predictable literature on the Mahābhārata, and could be a good starting point for anyone who wants to critically study the epic “as a whole.” ' Swami Narasimhananda, Reading Religion (http://readingreligion.org/books/argument-and-design)
