Böcker av Kevin McGrath

ON FRIENDSHIP is a book about the origins of consciousness and the place that friendship possesses in that process. As early human beings advanced out of Africa and slowly populated our earth they did so in terms of walking. Friendship, more than any other emotional experience-rather than kinship-was central in that development of incipient awareness. The practice of walking was a condition that was profoundly inherent in the early composition of psyche and this book presents four Walks-in Greece, the Windward Isles, western India, and New England-as representative of such apprehension. Walking is here portrayed as a transcendental and philosophical activity and as a constitutive source-through the work of apperception-of human understanding. It is the development of friendship that transformed the experience of the pedestrian from one of the most intrinsic sources of the human psyche into a situation of moral sentience.

FAME is a book about human affection and disaffection and the unique narrative which presents this perpetual movement. The poems come from India, Greece, the Windward Islands, and New England, places whose landscapes have informed the metaphors of this work. Love being itself the only metaphor that allows us to apprehend our true freedom in this world, enabling us to give more than we receive so that our aim be true. Fame is a sign of this transcendental knowledge and experience.

Song of the Republic is a mythical handbook of poetry about these United States and how they first arose in consciousness. The native awareness of our pre-Columbian and pre-Cartesian terrain, the terrible ordeals of human extinction and trafficking, the violence of civil contention, and the vast endurance and visionary efforts of millions of European and Asian migrants voyaging toward this land, have produced an American culture that is deeply imbued with the experience of terrific grief and yet it is one whose composition is profoundly feminine. In this book there is no male gaze, for the work is a feminist project; in its purest sense the male gaze only truly concerns situations where men are thinking about other men.

In Raja Yudhisthira, Kevin McGrath brings his comprehensive literary, ethnographic, and analytical knowledge of the epic Mahabharata to bear on the representation of kingship in the poem.

"This personal narrative about life in a remote desert region of western India tells of how love of place and love of person find their equilibrium in a world far removed from modernity. Yet this small, distant land of kingship and pastoral life is rapidly being eroded by the new India of commerce and industrialization"--

This book is a study of heroic femininity as it appears in the epic Mahabharata, and focuses particularly on the roles of wife, daughter-in-law, and mother, on how these women speak, and on the kinship groups and varying marital systems that surround them.

Heroic Krsna depicts a pre-Hindu superhuman hero who became the divinity Krsna. Drawn from the epic Mahabharata, Kevin McGrath's account of the warrior-charioteer and his friendship with Arjuna explores cultural continuities from the Bronze Age Vedic world and illustrates the pre-divine life of one of the most popular Indian deities of today.

Jaya is a study of how the four poets of the Indian epic Mahabharata fuse their separate performances of the poem into a single and seamless work of art. The subtle poetics of preliteracy and literacy which are compounded in one performance are demonstrated and made distinct in both a literary and a conceptual light.