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Naomi Appleton
Naomi Appleton
Front Cover
Back Cover
Naomi Appleton
The Narrative Imagination and Ancient Indian Religious Literature
Author:
Naomi Appleton
Series:
Sanctum Studies in Indian Intellectual, Cultural, and Historical Traditions
Binding:
Paperback
FORTHCOMING
About the Book
What can stories do that other forms of religious expression cannot?
The Narrative Imagination and Ancient Indian Religious Literature
explores narrative as more than a means of communicating religious ideas. Naomi Appleton approaches storytelling as a distinctive mode of thinking, imagining, and making sense of the world, asking why religious communities devoted such energy to telling, preserving, adapting, and sharing stories.Moving across Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu traditions, the book examines the shared narrative universe of ancient India, where characters, motifs, plots, and genres circulated across religious boundaries. It considers how ideas of karma, rebirth, time, causality, and human and divine agency shaped the possibilities of storytelling, and how narratives could communicate, challenge, and even create religious doctrine.Appleton also explores the imaginative, emotional, and ethical power of stories: their capacity to generate devotion, provoke reflection, reshape moral perception, and make religious figures vividly present to their audiences. Bringing ancient Indian materials into conversation with wider approaches to narrative, the book ultimately asks what India’s distinctive genres, interconnected storyworlds, and understandings of storytelling can contribute to a more genuinely global theory of narrative.
About the Author
Naomi Appleton
Naomi Appleton is Professor of Buddhist Studies and Indian Religions at the University of Edinburgh and Co-Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Buddhist Studies. Her research focuses on the role of narrative in the construction, communication, and contestation of religious ideas in early South Asia, particularly across Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu traditions.
She is the author of
Jātaka Stories in Theravāda Buddhism: Narrating the Bodhisatta Path
,
Narrating Karma and Rebirth: Buddhist and Jain Multi-Life Stories
, and
Shared Characters in Jain, Buddhist and Hindu Narrative: Gods, Kings and Other Heroes
. She was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2017 and has led the development of the Jātaka Stories database, a major digital resource for the comparative study of Buddhist narrative.
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