ABSTRACT
The six essays making up this section of the companion address its thematic focus in varied ways, which is not surprising given the very broad scope of “literary and material poetics” across human geographies and time, as well as the spectrum of interpretations that the rubric itself accommodates and invites. The essays are formed as case studies, focused inquiries built around single, unique objects or as sets of like objects related by a common function or medium. Approaches to literary and material poetics also differ, chiefly in the conceived relation between literature and the material object. The object may manifest language visibly—as an element within the object's physical matrix (e.g., illustrated printed book, manuscript, scroll painting, ceramics)—or invisibly through a discursive framework that proposes an interrelationship between an object and oral or written language (e.g., the essay on Kashmiri carpets). Apart from these direct relationships formed between literature and material, there are of course a host of other written primary sources employed by the authors for the light they shed as evidence of historical contexts and conditions. And of course the poetics of literature and material could be treated wholly independently of each other by examining the form, structure, and discourse of literature and material artifacts separately. The pronounced attention given to questions of medium and materiality, artisanal knowledge, and embodied making, especially in the last 20 years, has generated an ever-expanding scholarly discourse—largely freed from literary approaches or linguistic theories—whose proliferation shows no sign of abatement. The poetics of materiality has thus become a fertile analytical category like never before. To differing degrees, such approaches also inform these essays.
