Things Reborn brings together four decades of scholarship on the Renaissance by Sukanta Chaudhuri, one of the foremost scholars of the Early Modern in our time. Written between 1984 and 2016, these twenty-nine essays are collected here for the first time, and constitute an ongoing and illuminating engagement with the European and English Renaissance, as well as Bengal's encounter with it in the nineteenth century. Along with figures such as Virgil, Petrarch, Dante, Langland, Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Bacon, Chaudhuri's essays engage with the rich terrain of early modern philosophy, philology, science, and art. The collection is not just indispensable for specialists in the field, but also those interested in the present and future of literary studies.
Sukanta Chaudhuri is Professor Emeritus at Jadavpur University. His interests cover many fields: the European Renaissance. Shakespeare and Early Modern English literature, textual studies, translation. Rabindranath Tagore, and digital humanities. His monographs include Infirm Glory Shakespeare and the Renaissance Image of Man (Clarendon Press, 1981), Renaissance Pastoral and Its English Developments (Clarendon Press, 1989). Translation and Understanding (Oxford University Press, 1999) and The Metaphysics of Text (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Among his edited volumes are Calcutta: The Living City (Oxford University Press, 1990). Pastoral Poetry of the English Renaissance (Manchester University Press, 2 vols., 2016-18), the Third Arden edition of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (Bloomsbury, 20171. The Cambridge Companion to Rabindranath Tagore (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and Machiavelli Then and Now (co-edited, Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Chaudhuri has translated extensively from Bengali into English, particularly Tagore, besides humour and nonsense literature by Sukumar Ray, Parashuram.. Girindrasekhar Basu and Annadashankar Ray. He has also translated Leonardo da Vinci's selected notebooks and Edward Lear's limericks into Bengali. He is General Editor of the Oxford Tagare Translations and the Italian-Bengali translation series of the Jadavpur University Press.
He was chief co-ordinator of the acclaimed Bichitra project, an online database of the print and manuscript oeuvre of Rabindranath Tagore "He is co-editor of Global Debates the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press, 2022).
My title seems appropriate for a collection of essays recalled from oblivion. The earliest piece was read at a conference in 1984, the last in 2016. There is nothing here that I would now disown, but my ideas and interests have changed substantially over this span of time. Some of the essays I would not think of writing today: in a few cases, perhaps could not, so greatly has my outlook shifted and my memory thrown out its old baggage for new. Others I would write very differently. However, I have resisted all temptation to revise them in line with my later reading and current views. That would have destroyed their integrity, leaving the reader dissatisfied and perhaps confused. Each essay carries its original imperfections on its head, and therefore its original identity. They are arranged by subject, not by date; but their dates, occasions, and publishing history are listed in an appendix, so that the reader can place those imperfections in context.
I have made two kinds of revision. When citing authors, I have sometimes (but not uniformly) replaced the original references with those to a later edition. This has never affected the argument: in fact, it has served to confirm it in the light of improved textual knowledge. Also, I have sometimes revised the phrasing without modifying its thrust. I have not added references to secondary material that appeared after the date of the essay. A few additional notes are clearly dated 2021.
I have lived and taught all my life in Kolkata, though with many visits to universities and libraries in the West, and some prolonged stays. The English Renaissance has been explored in India for some two hundred years; by way of both ideas and material, what I gathered in the West augmented (often bountifully) the store at home. The continental European Renaissance has never been widely studied in India. I was exceptionally lucky that from my undergraduate days, I engaged with the one community of scholars in the land with an informed, in fact distinctive, interest in the field. My greatest debt in that quarter is acknowledged in the dedication. But here, I could extend my ideas to good purpose only through interaction with Western scholars and access to Western libraries.
The last two essays explore a richly contentious field of Indian, and more specifically Bengali, cultural history. The nineteenth-century Bengal Renaissance can only justify its appellation in terms of European precedents and affinities.
**Contents and Sample Pages**
For privacy concerns, please view our Privacy Policy
Send as free online greeting card
Email a Friend
Manage Wishlist