This book is the first to present current scholarship on gender and in regional and sectarian versions of the R m ya a. Contributors explore in what ways the versions relate to other R m ya a texts as they deal with the female persona and the cultural values implicit in them. Using a wide variety of approaches, both analytical and descriptive, the authors discover common ground between narrative variants even as their diversity is recognized.

It offers an analysis in the shaping of the heterogeneous R ma tradition through time as it can be viewed from the perspective of narrating...