ABSTRACT
The Introduction first addresses the general goal of the work: to demonstrate that Jain authors continually rewrote the story of Rāma using innovative literary and artistic strategies in order to construct and project novel visions of moral personhood. The chapter then introduces the two main subjects of the book, the authors Raviṣeṇa and Jinadāsa, before detailing the main extant trends in scholarly engagement with Jain Rāmāyaṇa literature. The first is a focus on the earliest iterations of the story as paradigmatic of the entire narrative tradition. The second is that Jain Rāmāyaṇa narratives have been examined in explicit comparison to Brahminical or “Hindu” versions of the same story. Finally, third, scholars have the different recensions of the story, focusing on continuity and similarity between exempla. The chapter then examines the traditional sources and content of discussions of Jain ethics, noting the fact that narrative literature is rarely included in such discussions. Finally, the chapter introduces the novel theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the book and provides the overviews of the five substantive chapters that follow.
