Reading north by south

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Thomas Keenan

The book is driven by a sense that literary and theoretical questions, and the ideas or concepts they appeal to or provoke, play a critical role in the way we think about and experience politics, but that literary critics and theorists do far too little to understand those links or make them matter outside a very restricted sphere. The author seeks to harness this specialized discourse in order to consider what ethical and political thinking might learn from literature and its theorists; from the difficult burdens that literature places on its readers and the unusual transformations it can enact in our language, the very medium of our shared life.

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Nicolas Wyatt

"This volume presents Nicolas Wyatt's discussions of royal ideology, its mythic and ritual expressions and various literary treatments in ancient Israel, viewed from a comparative perspective. Exploring the possibility that in many of the manifestations of Israelite kingship we can detect the influence of broader cultural patterns, notably as found in Egyptian and West Semitic contexts, Nicolas Wyatt explores the main early cultural influences on Israel and emphasizes the mythic dimension in which the 'divinity' of the king is a real factor."--BOOK JACKET.

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James Duerlinger

"In this book, Vasubandhu's classic work, "Refutation of the Theory of a Self" is translated and provided with an introduction and commentary. The translation, the first into a modern Western language from the Sanskrit text, is intended for use by those who wish to begin a careful philosophical study of Indian Buddhist theories of persons. Special features of the introduction and commentary are their extensive explanations of the arguments for the theories of persons of Vasubandhu and the Pudgalavadins, the Buddhist philosophers whose theory is the central target of Vasubandhu's refutation of the theory of a self."--Jacket.

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David V. Mason

Theatre and Religion on Krishna's Stage examines the history and form of India's râs lila folk theatre, and discusses how this theatre functions as a mechanism of worship and spirituality among Krishna devotees in India. From analyses of performances and conversations with performers, audience, and local scholars, Mason argues that ŕs lila actors and audience alike actively assume roles that locate them together in the spiritual reality that the play represents. Correlating Krishna devotion and theories of religious experience, this book suggests that the emotional experience of theatrical fiction may arise from the propensity of audiences to play out roles of their own through which they share a performance's reality.