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Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime. By VIJAY MISHRA. SUNY Series on the Sublime. Edited by Rob Wilson. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. xiii, 268 pp. $65.50 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).
This is an ambitious, thoughtful, intellectually omnivorous book. Vijay Mishra's study argues for the presence of the "aesthetic order" of the "sublime"-as defined by Kant, and extended by Hegel-in a myriad of Indian (mostly Hindu) devotional texts from various historical periods, languages, and regional traditions. Mishra reads through a mind-numbing cross-cultural collection of philosophers, literary critics, and poets, east and west, to argue the "sublime" in India, from the Bhagavad Gita and Gitagovinda, to Dr. Johnson, Stanley Fish, and Kabir. He might have done better to limit the scope of the book, for themes multiply and sometimes crowd each other out: there is rasa theory; reader-response; Schopenhauer and Islamic mathnavi; Orientalism, Samkhya, and G. N. Devy's postcolonial critiques of Indian literature. It would be impossible in the short span of this review to treat all the...