Böcker av Sheldon Pollock

The papers collected in The Loeb Classical Library and Its Progeny explore the legacy for which James Loeb is best known, the Loeb Classical Library, and the three series it inspired, and take stock of these series in light of more general themes bearing on translations of "classical" texts and their audiences.

Philology-the discipline of making sense of texts-is enjoying a renaissance within academia. World Philology charts the evolution of philology across the many cultures and time periods in which it has been practiced and demonstrates how this branch of knowledge, like philosophy and mathematics, is essential to human understanding.

In this work of impressive scholarship, Sheldon Pollock explores the remarkable rise and fall of Sanskrit, India's ancient language, as a vehicle of poetry and polity. He traces the two great moments of its transformation: the first around the beginning of the Common Era, when Sanskrit, long a sacred language, was reinvented as a code for literary and political expression, the start of an amazing career that saw Sanskrit literary culture spread from Afghanistan to Java. The second moment occurred around the beginning of the second millennium, when local speech forms challenged and eventually replaced Sanskrit in both the literary and political arenas. Drawing striking parallels, chronologically as well as structurally, with the rise of Latin literature and the Roman empire, and with the new vernacular literatures and nation-states of late-medieval Europe, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men asks whether these very different histories challenge current theories of culture and power and suggest new possibilities for practice.