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Vikramaditya: An Archetypal Portrait

Vikramaditya: An Archetypal Portrait

$30.00
Author:Shreeja Tripathi Sharma
ISBN 13:9788126933594
Binding:Hardbound
Language:English
Year:2022
Subject:Language and literature

About the Book

The historic grand narrative of the legendary king Vikramaditya is interspersed with myths and has been scrutinised suspiciously for historical accuracy. Despite this, the intense engagement of Indian culture with the ideology of Vikramaditya has sustained through generations. The book seeks to reconstruct a portrait of the legendary king Vikramaditya based on the paradigm of archetypal literary criticism. It attempts to address the problematic embedded in the narrative of myths with riddled history through its focus on the archetypal core of meaning—on that constant which does not change, even in the face of change. The book examines the numismatic evidence of punch marked coins of Ujjain, the mythic narrative and cultural practises of the Vikramaditya tradition through an archetypal lens and synchronically traces its interlinkages with analogous parallels in world culture. The book consists of essays which provoke abstract, archetypal portraits which stimulate a perceptible rather than an empirical sketch. The book leverages on the autonomy given to the transforming paradigm of historiography to augment the conventional narrative with the often-disregarded element of myths. It innovates the structure and methodology to recreate but does not undermine the central authority of the grand narrative, which it rather seeks to strengthen and reinvigorate. It recolours to restore but takes care not to disfigure as it reshapes the traditional narratives. The archetypal portrait finds a middle ground between the grace of aesthetic conventions and the contemporary frame of redefinition.