A History Of Kanarese Literature

Author : Edward P. Rice
Publisher : Forgotten Books
ISBN 13 : 9781330445655
Total Pages : 138 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (456 download)

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Download or read book A History of Kanarese Literature written by Edward P. Rice and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2015-06-27 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from A History of Kanarese Literature: Second Edition Revised and Enlarged Fifty years ago very few, even of the Kanarese people themselves, had any idea of the range of Kanarese literature or of the relative age of the books which constitute it. Our present knowledge is the fruit of patient work on the part of a small number of painstaking scholars, who have laboriously pieced together the scattered information contained in inscriptions on stone and copper and in the colophons and text of palm leaf manuscripts. It is the practice of Kanarese poets to preface their works, not only with invocations of the gods and of the saints of old time, but also with the praise of former poets. This practice is of very great historical value, for it enables us to place the poets in their relative chronological order. As in many instances the writers received patronage from some reigning king, the mention of the name of the royal patron enables us further to give to many of the poets an approximately correct date. In this way a list of Kanarese poets can be drawn up in fairly correct order. The result shows that Kanarese has a literature of vast extent, reaching back till its beginnings are lost in the mists of time in the early centuries of the Christian era. The first modern scholars to give with any fulness a connected view of Kanarese literature were the German missionaries, Würth and Kittel. The latter in 1875 prefixed a valuable essay on Kanarese Literature to his edition of Nagavarma's Prosody. Since then a vast deal of additional information has been obtained, more especially through the researches of Mr. Lewis Rice, C.I.E., Director of Archæological Researches in Mysore, and his assistants and successor. I am not aware that there is any separate volume in the English language giving a history of Kanarese literature. The most readable general account is to be found in Mr. Lewis Rice's Gazetteer of Mysore, Vol. I, and in his Mysore and Coorg from the Inscriptions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.