A Political History of Literature

This book is a study of the literary cultures of the fifteenth century in north India. It uses an intimate analysis of two Sanskrit texts (on writing and ethics) and one Apabhramsa text of a poet-scholar (Vidyapati) as an entry point into the eclectic knowledge formations of the time. It argues that the political imagination of the time was not constrained by the shrunken territories of the states in the fifteenth century.