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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
An Alaṅkāra Reader: Classical Indian Poetics

An Alaṅkāra Reader: Classical Indian Poetics

Bronner, Yigal

Hardcover

Series: Historical Sourcebooks in Classical Indian Thought

PhilosophyLiterary CriticismGeneral Poetry

ISBN10: 0231219989
ISBN13: 9780231219983
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: Sep 8 2026
Pages: 480
Weight: 2.31
Height: 1.06 Width: 7.00 Depth: 10.00
Language: English

Classical Indian poetics prized the skillful use of alaṅkāras, or ornaments--literary figures of speech. Across more than a millennium, Sanskrit writers developed and elaborated an account of literary embellishment that is perhaps the world's most complex and long-standing theory of figuration. Yet it remains the least studied of India's major classical systems of thought.

An Alaṅkāra Reader is a groundbreaking panoramic overview of this tradition, presenting extensive and accessible translations of key works that span its history, from the sixth to eighteenth century CE. These texts vividly show how Indian theorists analyzed simile, metaphor, allegory, and dozens of other figures that are distinctive to their world. Yigal Bronner's commentary makes Sanskrit concepts of ornamentation approachable while placing them in historical context. He provides a new account of the history of Sanskrit poetics, showing how it underwent successive waves of theoretical revolutions and emerged as a prestigious field that attracted a variety of scholars in the early modern era.

Featuring many previously untranslated texts, An Alaṅkāra Reader is an essential resource for the study of classical Indian thought, the intellectual history of South Asia, and comparative literature. It reveals the depth and nuance of Sanskrit's science of ornaments for anyone interested in poetic theory, figuration, and aesthetics across world traditions.

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