"It was a wonderful experience interacting with you and appreciate the way you have planned and executed the whole publication process within the agreed timelines.”
Subrat SaurabhAuthor of Kuch Woh Pal
With the rise of scientific temper and industrialization in the West around the 19th century, one finds in Western literary criticism an apologetic urgency to defend literature against natural sciences, social science, psychology, economics, political science and so on. Theoretical templates and terminologies were borrowed from these utile discourses and introduced to literary criticism to make it appear scientific. More non-literary methodologies were introduced to comprehend the nature of literariness. This marked a historic rupture in the continuous Western critical tradition that derived its investigative modalities from philosophy, linguistics and aesthetics. The present work, Literature as Knowledge in Indian and Western Tradition: Theory of Knowledge, Literary Taxonomy and Aesthetics, makes a panoptic survey of major theoretical trends in ancient India and the West that sprang from the domains concerning the fundamental aspect of meaning-making or artha-nirdharana. Like all other verbal discourses, literature makes use of language but with an obvious difference. This present work exhausts its critical enquiry into what makes up this marked difference and how literature as a domain of knowledge responds to the questions of truths about perceptible reality, processes of meaning-making, principles of literary classification and aesthetic experience.
Maulik Vyas
Maulik Vyas holds his doctoral degree in English literature concerning Indian and Western poetics. His continued interest and work in literary theory and criticism led him to explore and publish in the fields of comparative literary studies, translation, folk studies and Indic studies. His involvement in reputed academic projects such as Encyclopaedias of Hinduism and Sanskrit Poetics, People’s Linguistic Survey of India and Critical Discourses in South Asia, among others, underscores his consistent and fruitful contribution to his field. Dr Vyas is an active translator and has published noted translations of critical, anthropological, reflective and creative writings from Gujarati and Hindi in English. He serves as an assistant professor of English (GES-II) at Government Engineering College, Bhuj.
