The Mahāhabhārata, a vital Indic epic and a flourishing influence on Indian culture past and present, has surprisingly enough hardly got much attention from scholars in the West. This latest volume in Brill's Indological Library convincingly fills this hiatus. At that, at the hand of the hero Karna, Kevin McGrath develops a view on the nature and function of the hero in epic Indic poetry. Making use of models taken from Indo-European and preliterate studies, a model emerges for 'heroic religion', having to a large extent shaped not only the Indic epics, but also cognate...

COMEDIA is a book about time, the emotions of time and the metaphors of time. It describes the cycle of the year in terms of the human heart: the year being the ideal paradigm or pattern of all human experience.

COMEDIA is a book about time, the emotions of time and the metaphors of time. It describes the cycle of the year in terms of the human heart: the year being the ideal paradigm or pattern of all human experience.

This volume is a study of heroic femininity as it appears in the epic Mahabharata, and focuses particularly on the role of wife, daughter-in-law, and mother, on how these women speak and on the kinship groups and varying marital systems that surround them.

Presents the study of how the four poets of the Indian epic Mahabharata fuse their separate performances of the poem into a single and seamless work of art. This book examines the different mnemonic forms engaged by this verbal activity focusing primarily on the distinction between what is seen and what is heard.

Nature learned long ago how useful proteins are as a diverse set of building blocks to make materials with very diverse properties. Spider webs, egg whites, hair follicles, and skeletal muscles are all largely protein. This book provides a glimpse into both nature's strategies for the design and produc tion of protein-based materials, and how scientists have been able to go beyond the constraints of natural materials to produce synthetic analogs with potentially wider ranges of properties. The work presented is very much the beginning of the story. Only recently has there been much progress...

This personal narrative about life in a remote desert region of Western India tells of how love of place and love of person find their equilibrium in a world far removed from modernity. Yet this small, distant land of kingship and pastoral life is rapidly being eroded by the new India of commerce and industrialization. The author describes in terms how an ancient society is transformed by the culture of consumption where the lyrical beauty of balance, exchange and loyalty are translated into a single market economy.