The Mahabharata Patriline: Gender, Culture, and the Royal Hereditary (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780754667872)

The Sanskrit Mahabharata (which contains the Bhagavad Gita) is sorely neglected as a classic - perhaps the classic - of world literature, and is of particularly timely human importance in today's globalised and war-torn world. This book is a chronological survey of the Sanskrit Mahabharata's central royal patriline - a family tree that is also a list of kings. Brodbeck explores the importance and implications of patrilineal maintenance within the royal culture depicted by the text, and shows how patrilineal memory comes up against the fact that in every generation a wife must be involved, with the consequent danger that the children might not sustain the memorial tradition of their paternal family. The Mahabharata Patriline bridges a gap in text-critical methodology between the traditional philological approach and more recent trends in gender and literary theory. Studying the Mahabharata as an integral literary unit and as a story stretched over dozens of generations, this book casts particular light on the events of the more recent generations and suggests that the text's internal narrators are members of the family whose story they tell.

Author: Simon Pearse Brodbeck
ISBN-10: 0754667871
ISBN-13: 9780754667872
Publisher: Routledge
Language: English
Published: 09/28/2009
Pages: 344
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.45lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.81d