Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime

The last two decades of the twentieth century have been marked by an immense revival of interest in the sublime, yet past studies have used Western texts as their archives. This book dramatically shifts the focus by examining a major instance of an Indian sublime: the Brahman. Mishra examines European theories of the sublime, reads them off against contemporary critical uses of the term (notable by Lyotard and Paul de Man) and propose that the Hindu Brahman constitutes an instance of one of the most fully developed of all sublime. The book is the first to offer a comprehensive theory of both the Indian sublime and Indian devotional verse.

"The book offers a highly original interpretation of one fundamental problem in Indian cultural history: how des a devotee establish a relationship with God (Brahman) when God is ultimately incapable of representation? Mishra brilliantly exposes this problem by introducing the theme of the sublime and shows how the problem has been confronted across a range panorama of historical time and several Indic languages."

Abut the Author:

Vijay Mishra is Professor of English literature at the University of Albera, Canada. He is the author of The Gothic Sublime, also published by State University of New York Press, and (with Bob Hodge) Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind.