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Maithil Women's Tales

ebook
Constrained by traditions restricting their movements and speech, the Maithil women of Nepal and India have long explored individual and collective life experiences by sharing stories with one another. Sometimes fantastical, sometimes including a kind of magical realism, these tales allow women to build community through a deeply personal and always evolving storytelling form.

In Maithil Women's Tales, Coralynn V. Davis examines how these storytellers weave together their own life experiences—the hardships and the pleasures—with age-old themes. In so doing, Davis demonstrates, they harness folk traditions to grapple personally as well as collectively with social values, behavioral mores, relationships, and cosmological questions.

Each chapter includes stories and excerpts that reveal Maithil women's gift for rich language, layered plots, and stunning allegory. In addition, Davis provides ethnographic and personal information that reveal the complexity of women's own lives, and includes works painted by Maithil storytellers to illustrate their tales. The result is a fascinating study of being and becoming that will resonate for readers in women's and Hindu studies, folklore, and anthropology.| Cover Title Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: The Living Story and the Storying of Life Chapter 1. Homo Narrans and the Irrepressibility of Stories Chapter 2. Metaphysical Questions of Fortune and Social Stratification Chapter 3. Virtue, Truth, and the Motherline of Morality Chapter 4. Loving Compassion, Maternal Devotion, and the Yearning for Home Chapter 5. Gendering Spatial Alterity: Why the Story Went into the Forest Chapter 6. Ponds, the Feminine Divine, and a Shift in Moral Register Chapter 7. Talking Tools, Femina Narrans, and the Irrepressibility of Women Notes Works Cited Index | "Davis provides a useful contextual analysis of Maithil folktales as told by the women who live along a border zone between India and Nepal. In her reader-friendly analysis she demonstrates that stories often have lives of their own, illuminating not only the nature of the cosmos, but also the relationship between the self and the worlds in which we live. The study provides valuable data on a region and narrative tradition understudied in the scholarly literature on South Asia."
—Frank J. Korom, author of South Asian Folklore: A Handbook
"Davis's engagement with the tales related to Maithil women provides a counterpoint to the usual engagement with their Mithila paintings, the better known of Maithil women's expressive arts. Here we also learn not only the tales, but Maithil women's interpretations of them, not only in oral comments but in newly created paintings that highlight what they think are the key components of these tales. A must read for scholars of South Asian oral traditions and a major addition to women's expressive traditions more generally."—Susan S. Wadley, author of Wife, Mother, Widow: Exploring Women's Lives in Northern India
"This well-grounded, thoroughly researched study should appeal to a wide audience interested in oral narrative performance and interpretation, not only in South Asia, but more generally in disciplines ranging from folklore and cultural anthropology to narrative theory and gender studies. It shows convincingly how traditional folktales told by Maithil women of Nepal can mount socially effective critiques as resistance to patriarchal social principles that otherwise marginalize these women. It offers much for readers with interest in the dynamics of gender, in oral narrative performance and strategies of its interpretation in social context."—Margaret Mills, co-editor of South...

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Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Kindle Book

  • Release date: September 25, 2014

OverDrive Read

  • ISBN: 9780252096303
  • Release date: September 25, 2014

EPUB ebook

  • ISBN: 9780252096303
  • File size: 4678 KB
  • Release date: September 25, 2014

Formats

Kindle Book
OverDrive Read
EPUB ebook

Languages

English

Constrained by traditions restricting their movements and speech, the Maithil women of Nepal and India have long explored individual and collective life experiences by sharing stories with one another. Sometimes fantastical, sometimes including a kind of magical realism, these tales allow women to build community through a deeply personal and always evolving storytelling form.

In Maithil Women's Tales, Coralynn V. Davis examines how these storytellers weave together their own life experiences—the hardships and the pleasures—with age-old themes. In so doing, Davis demonstrates, they harness folk traditions to grapple personally as well as collectively with social values, behavioral mores, relationships, and cosmological questions.

Each chapter includes stories and excerpts that reveal Maithil women's gift for rich language, layered plots, and stunning allegory. In addition, Davis provides ethnographic and personal information that reveal the complexity of women's own lives, and includes works painted by Maithil storytellers to illustrate their tales. The result is a fascinating study of being and becoming that will resonate for readers in women's and Hindu studies, folklore, and anthropology.| Cover Title Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: The Living Story and the Storying of Life Chapter 1. Homo Narrans and the Irrepressibility of Stories Chapter 2. Metaphysical Questions of Fortune and Social Stratification Chapter 3. Virtue, Truth, and the Motherline of Morality Chapter 4. Loving Compassion, Maternal Devotion, and the Yearning for Home Chapter 5. Gendering Spatial Alterity: Why the Story Went into the Forest Chapter 6. Ponds, the Feminine Divine, and a Shift in Moral Register Chapter 7. Talking Tools, Femina Narrans, and the Irrepressibility of Women Notes Works Cited Index | "Davis provides a useful contextual analysis of Maithil folktales as told by the women who live along a border zone between India and Nepal. In her reader-friendly analysis she demonstrates that stories often have lives of their own, illuminating not only the nature of the cosmos, but also the relationship between the self and the worlds in which we live. The study provides valuable data on a region and narrative tradition understudied in the scholarly literature on South Asia."
—Frank J. Korom, author of South Asian Folklore: A Handbook
"Davis's engagement with the tales related to Maithil women provides a counterpoint to the usual engagement with their Mithila paintings, the better known of Maithil women's expressive arts. Here we also learn not only the tales, but Maithil women's interpretations of them, not only in oral comments but in newly created paintings that highlight what they think are the key components of these tales. A must read for scholars of South Asian oral traditions and a major addition to women's expressive traditions more generally."—Susan S. Wadley, author of Wife, Mother, Widow: Exploring Women's Lives in Northern India
"This well-grounded, thoroughly researched study should appeal to a wide audience interested in oral narrative performance and interpretation, not only in South Asia, but more generally in disciplines ranging from folklore and cultural anthropology to narrative theory and gender studies. It shows convincingly how traditional folktales told by Maithil women of Nepal can mount socially effective critiques as resistance to patriarchal social principles that otherwise marginalize these women. It offers much for readers with interest in the dynamics of gender, in oral narrative performance and strategies of its interpretation in social context."—Margaret Mills, co-editor of South...

Expand title description text