If all the world were paper

• Verfasst von: Williams, Tyler Walker [VerfasserIn]
• Titel: If all the world were paper
• Titelzusatz: a history of writing in Hindi
• Verf.angabe: Tyler W. Williams
• Verlagsort: New York
• Verlag: Columbia University Press
• E-Jahr: 2024
• Jahr: [2024]
• Umfang: xxi, 308 Seiten
• Illustrationen: Illustrationen
• Fussnoten: Includes bibliographical references and index
• ISBN: 978-0-231-21112-3
• ISBN: 978-0-231-21113-0
• Schlagwörter: (s)Hindi / (s)Literatur / (s)Sachkultur / (s)Textualität / (z)Geschichte 1500-1800
• Sprache: eng
• Bibliogr. Hinweis: Erscheint auch als : Online-Ausgabe: Williams, Tyler Walker: If All the World Were Paper. - New York : Columbia University Press, 2024 |(DLC)2024009701
• Sach-SW: Asiatische Geschichte
• Sach-SW: HIS062000
• Sach-SW: History
• Sach-SW: LITERARY CRITICISM / Asian / Indic
• Sach-SW: LITERARY CRITICISM / Books & Reading
• Sach-SW: Literatur: Geschichte und Kritik
• Sach-SW: Literary criticism
• Geograph. SW: Indien
• K10plus-PPN: 1884424937

Abstract

Telling the story of Hindi literatures development, If All the World Were Paper demonstrates how the ways books were inscribed, organized, and used can tell us as much about their meaning and significance as the texts within them

Abstract

"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"--