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Tamil Heroic Poetry

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Specifications

	Publisher: Hachette India
	Author K. Kailasapathy
	Language: English
	Pages: 403
	Cover: PAPERBACK
	8x5 inch
	Weight 380 gm
	Edition: 2023
	ISBN: 9789357311694
	HCG017

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Book Description

About the Book In this acclaimed comparative study, K. Kailasapathy, the celebrated Sri Lankan academic and critic, introduces and interprets ancient Tamil poems and examines the stylistic heritage, themes and motifs pervading Sangam poetry while building the literary corpus's bridge to heroic poetry in other languages - most notably Greek. He identifies the formulaic expression, stock phrases and overarching sensibilities pervasive in the poems and, going much against the popular grain, expands on the notion that oral verse-making is central to Sangam poetry. A nod to Milman Parry, this deeply necessary exploration of our neglected past is an engaging and accessible discourse on one of our most fertile literary ages and, with much agility, connects the dots in studying early Tamil poetry for a modern reader.

About the Author Born in Malaya, K. Kailasapathy (1933-1982) was educated at Victoria Institution (Kuala Lumpur), Jaffna Hindu College and Royal College (Colombo). After graduating from the University of Ceylon, he was the editor of Thinakaran, a national newspaper, for a few years. In 1961, he became an assistant lecturer at the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya, and after his Master's, he proceeded to the University of Birmingham, where he received a doctorate in 1966. The same year he returned to the University of Ceylon and later moved to the University of Colombo. As the first president of the newly created Jaffna Campus of the University of Ceylon, he played an essential role in building up Jaffna University in its crucial early stages. Between 1977 and 1978, he was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the USA and a fellow of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa. He passed away prematurely in December 1982. A well-known literary critic and a prolific writer, he has written eighteen books in Tamil and English, and numerous papers and articles.

Foreword It is fitting that this new edition of K. Kailasapathy's Tamil Heroic Poetry should appear at a time when a popular biography of Milman Parry, to whose work this book owes much, has been published.' Tamil Heroic Poetry, now a classic, is possibly the most cited work on Tamil literature to be published in the past century. Along with A.K. Ramanujan's The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology, published a year earlier in 1967, it changed the way the world looked at ancient Tamil literature. That a scholarly book that first appeared under a niche academic imprint Clarendon Press of the Oxford University Press should be republished more than half a century later by a trade publisher speaks for not only its enduring quality but also its readability. K. Kailasapathy (1933-1982), the most notable and accomplished of Marxist critics that Tamil has produced, straddled the academic world and the public sphere with great ease and dexterity. Even Sundara Ramaswamy, the great Tamil writer who was the target of Kailasapathy's pointed criticism, acknowledged that it was Kailasapathy who demonstrated, in the Tamil context, the unassailable link between society and literature.

Preface The aim of the present study is twofold. Firstly, in general, to apply the comparative method to the study of early Tamil poetry, and second, in particular, to compare Tamil poetry with Homeric poetry, showing that both reflect the conditions of the so-called Heroic Age.! The idea of such a study is not in itself new. Writing about the early Tamil works in general, G. U. Pope (1885) remarked that their resemblance to the corresponding poetry of Greece is 'remarkable as to their sentiments, and the state of society when they were uttered. S. Krishnaswami Aiyangar observed (1923) that some of the Cankam poems 'are like the heroic tales from out of which sprang Homeric Iliad. It remained, however, for N. K. Sidhanta (1927) to suggest a concrete line of inquiry. In themes and their treatment, he observed, "Tamil poetry invites a comparison with heroic poems in other languages'. Following Sidhanta, S. Vaiyapuri Pillai (1952) emphasized the relevance of Chadwick's Heroic Age for the interpretation of early Tamil minstrelsy, and ventured the opinion that some at least of the earliest poems might be taken to reflect the spirit of a Heroic Age. Recently J. R. Marr (1958), in his monograph on the Eight Anthologies, has mentioned en passant that Tamil bardic poetry has certain features in common with other heroic poetry. Two other studies, treating Nature' and Love, have drawn attention to the existence of Greek parallels.

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