Tradition And Terrain-Aesthetic Continuities

Tradition and Terrain is an attempt to map out the emergence of an aesthetic awareness in terms of the land, region and creative consciousness. The essays trace the presence of adbhuta rasa as an the aesthetic of wonder, formulate a critique of ceremony, and reach beyond the phenomenal into the innermost possibilities of ecological wisdom and alter/native discourses, even while reconstructing a poetics of bhakti in the context of Indian tradition. Although written variously in diverse contexts and situations these essays evidence the manifold concerns of the Indian creative/critical psyche. As a cultural past is resuscitated through individual texts as well as collective efforts through different genres and categories, what emerges still continues to share a relevance and positive edge while remaining imaginatively powerful and creatively fertile. This book is bound to be of interest both to the casual reader and the academic scholar. These essays have been published earlier in : Revaluations, Samyukta, and Summerhill.

Dr. S Murali-- poet, painter and critic is Reader in the Department of English, Pondicherry University, Pondicherry. He is the author of The Mantra Of Vision (1997); South Indian Studies (1998), and two volumes of poetry-Night Heron-Poems and Sketches (1998) and Conversations with Children (2005). He has also co-authored with Usha V.T Figuring the Female: Women's Discourse, Art and Literature (2006) Dr. Usha V.T, critic and theorist, is Reader and Coordinator of the Center for Women's Studies, Pondicherry University, Pondicherry. She has authored a number of articles on issues relating to women and ideology and also a book on the twentieth century British poet Ted Hughes- The Real and the Imagined (1998). She is the co-author of Figuring the Female: Women's Discourse, Art and Literature (2006).

**Contents and Sample Pages**