© Columbia University Press
Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration
March, 2010
Cloth, 376 pages, 3 illus; 6 tables
ISBN: 978-0-231-15160-3
$50.00
/ £34.50
"Yigal Bronner's book fills a great lacuna in the study of South Asian literature and literary theory." — Journal of Hindu Studies
"There can be no doubt that this is an original and outstanding contribution to the field of Sanskrit literary scholarship. Extreme Poetry is at the highest level of Indological literary scholarship, and it is evident that Yigal Bronner is deeply enamored with his subject. One of his chief contributions is to ask us to look once again at the seriousness of the aesthetic and emotive purposes with which this phenomenon has been skillfully and effectively deployed by some of the most highly regarded poets and playwrights of the Indian tradition. Bronner's text will serve as a much needed corrective to the dismissive stance taken by critics toward an interesting and even astonishing literary technique. This book shows it to be far more than mere verbal fireworks." — R. P. Goldman, University of California at Berkeley
"There is nothing else available in Indian studies or in literary studies that is at all like this book. Extreme Poetry opens up a new field, and new possibilities in existing fields. It treats a phenomenon in Sanskrit-simultaneous narration-which everyone reading Indian literature has encountered but which no one has been able to make much sense of in intellectual terms. Specialists, students, and lovers of Indian literature will find this book a revelation and a pleasure to read, from the first page to the last. It is destined to become something of a classic." — C. Minkowski, University of Oxford