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Poetry as Prayer in the Sanskrit Hymns of Kashmir
This book investigates the history of a popular genre of Sanskrit devotional poetry in Kashmir: the stotra, or hymn of praise. Such hymns demonstrate and frequently reflect upon the close link between literary and religious expression in South Asia—the relationship between poetry and prayer. This study presents an overview and reassessment of the stotra genre, including its definition and history, focusing on literary hymns in Kashmir from the eighth to the twentieth century. Investigating these hymns as theological texts, it argues for their pedagogical potential and their particular appeal for non-dualistic authors. Analyzing such hymns as prayers, it unpacks the unique capabilities of the stotra form and challenges persistent assumptions in the study of Hindu prayer. The book argues for the literary ambition and creativity of many stotras across the centuries, and it complicates standard narratives about the vitality and so-called death of Sanskrit in the region. Śaiva poets also engaged with the rich discourse on aesthetics in Kashmir, and this study charts how they experiment with the idea of a devotional “taste” (bhaktirasa) long before Vaiṣṇava authors would make it well known in South Asia. Finally, it presents new perspectives on the historiography of bhakti traditions and “Kashmir Śaivism.” Overall, this book reveals the unique nature and history of stotra literature in Kashmir; demonstrates the diversity, flexibility, and persistent appeal of the stotra genre; and introduces new sources and ways of thinking about these popular texts and the comparative study of devotional poetry and prayer.
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Technicians of the sacred : a range of poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania
\"A wide-ranging anthology of ethnopoetry including origin texts, visionary texts, texts about death, texts about events--collected from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Ancient Near East, and Oceania.\"--Provided by publiher.
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Religion around Emily Dickinson
Religion Around Emily Dickinson begins with a seeming paradox posed by Dickinson's posthumously published works: while her poems and letters contain many explicitly religious themes and concepts, throughout her life she resisted joining her local church and rarely attended services. Prompted by this paradox, W. Clark Gilpin proposes, first, that understanding the religious aspect of the surrounding culture enhances our appreciation of Emily Dickinson's poetry and, second, that her poetry casts light on features of religion in nineteenth-century America that might otherwise escape our attention. Religion, especially Protestant Christianity, was \"around\" Emily Dickinson not only in explicitly religious practices, literature, architecture, and ideas but also as an embedded influence on normative patterns of social organization in the era, including gender roles, education, and ideals of personal intimacy and fulfillment. Through her poetry, Dickinson imaginatively reshaped this richly textured religious inheritance to create her own personal perspective on what it might mean to be religious in the nineteenth century. The artistry of her poetry and the profundity of her thought have meant that this personal perspective proved to be far more than \"merely\" personal. Instead, Dickinson's creative engagement with the religion around her has stimulated and challenged successive generations of readers in the United States and around the world.
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Classical Samaritan Poetry
This book introduces the evocative but largely unknown tradition of Samaritan religious poetry from late antiquity to a new audience.These verses provide a unique window into the Samaritan religious world during a formative period.
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Where did you come from, baby dear?
In an ode to the entrance of newborn babies into the world, a parent asks questions of how baby came to be, and baby answers.
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Women's Poetry and Religion in Victorian England
Victorian women poets lived in a time when religion was a vital aspect of their identities. Cynthia Scheinberg examines Anglo-Jewish (Grace Aguilar and Amy Levy) and Christian (Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti) women poets, and argues that there are important connections between the discourses of nineteenth-century poetry, gender and religious identity. Further, Scheinberg argues that Jewish and Christian women poets had a special interest in Jewish discourse; calling on images from Judaism and the Hebrew Scriptures, their poetry created complex arguments about the relationships between Jewish and female artistic identity. She suggests that Jewish and Christian women used poetry as a site for creative and original theological interpretation, and that they entered into dialogue through their poetry about their own and each other's religious and artistic identities. This book's interdisciplinary methodology calls on poetics, religious studies, feminist literary criticism, and little read Anglo-Jewish primary sources.
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A Vaiٍsٍnava poet in early modern Bengal : Kavikarٍnapهura's splendour of speech
\"This book examines the practice of poetry in the devotional Vaiٍsٍnava tradition inspired by âSrهi Kٍrٍsٍna Caitanya (1486-1533), through a detailed study of the Sanskrit poetic works of Kavikarٍnapهura, one of the most significant sixteenth-century Caitanya Vaiٍsٍnava poets and theologians. It places his ideas in the context both of Sanskrit literary theory (by exploring his use of earlier works of Sanskrit criticism) and of Vaiٍsٍnava theology (by tracing the origins of his theological ideas to earlier Vaiٍsٍnava teachers, especially his guru âSrهinهatha). Both Kavikarٍnapهura's poetics as well as the style of his poetry is in many ways at odds with those of his time, particularly with respect to the place of phonetic ornamentation and rasa. Like later early modern theorists, Kavikarٍnapهura reaches back to the earliest Sanskrit poeticians whom he attempts to harmonise with the theories current in his time, to develop a new poetics that values both literary ornamentation and the suggestion of emotion through rasa. This book argues that the reasons of and purposes for Kavikarٍnapهura's literary innovations are firmly rooted in his unique Vaiٍsٍnava theology, and exemplifies this through a careful reading of select passages from the هAnanda-vٍrndهavana, his poetic retelling of Kٍrٍsٍna's play in Vٍrndهavana.\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Religious Imaginaries
Religious Imaginariesexplores liturgical practice as formative for how three Victorian women poets imagined the world and their place in it and, consequently, for how they developed their creative and critical religious poetics. In doing so, this new study rethinks several assumptions in the field: that Victorian women's faith commitments tend to limit creativity; that the contours of church experiences matter little for understanding religious poetry; and that gender is more significant than liturgy in shaping women's religious poetry.Exploring the import of bodily experience for spiritual, emotional, and cognitive forms of knowing, Karen Dieleman explains and clarifies the deep orientations of different strands of nineteenth-century Christianity, such as Congregationalism's high regard for verbal proclamation, Anglicanism and Anglo-Catholicism's valuation of manifestation, and revivalist Roman Catholicism's recuperation of an affective aesthetic. Looking specifically at Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Adelaide Procter as astute participants in their chosen strands of Christianity, Dieleman reveals the subtle textures of these women's religious poetry: the different voices, genres, and aesthetics they create in response to their worship experiences. Part recuperation, part reinterpretation, Dieleman's readings highlight each poet's innovative religious poetics.Dieleman devotes two chapters to each of the three poets: the first chapter in each pair delineates the poet's denominational practices and commitments; the second reads the corresponding poetry.Religious Imaginarieshas appeal for scholars of Victorian literary criticism and scholars of Victorian religion, supporting its theoretical paradigm by digging deeply into primary sources associated with the actual churches in which the poets worshipped, detailing not only the liturgical practices but also the architectural environments that influenced the worshipper's formation. By going far beyond descriptions of various doctrinal positions, this research significantly deepens our critical understanding of Victorian Christianity and the culture it influenced.
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