Description: From the late fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the imagination came to be recognized in South Indian culture as the defining feature of human beings. Shulman elucidates the distinctiveness of South Indian theories of the imagination and shows how they differ radically from Western notions of reality and models of the mind.
Brief description: David Shulman is Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Review Quotes: With extraordinary range across languages, texts, and thought worlds, but with a special attention to south India in the early modern period, David Shulman shows us how the imagination works and how it has changed across space and time: in one place as pathological, for example, in another as therapeutic; at one time fictive and hence false, in another, fictive and hence real. This is mind-opening--and astonishingly imaginative--scholarship.--Sheldon Pollock, Columbia University