In this standard-setting study of a South Asian literary technique, Yigal Bronner provides a fascinating corrective to garden-variety Orientalist pronouncements on śleṣa, a method by which an author can narrate two or more stories through the vehicle of a single composition by means of homonyms, homophones, or by taking brilliant advantage of syntactical ambiguity (Bronner documents Jain śleṣa texts in which as many as seven simultaneous readings can be derived from a single work). Long characterized by Western scholars as aberrant and decadent, Bronner convincingly argues for śleṣa's centrality as a literary phenomenon in the long history of South Asian literature, characterizing its “creation, consumption, and study” as “a robust literary movement that lasted over 1,000 years throughout the Indian subcontinent” (p. 2).

Śleṣa texts are commonly recognized as belonging to the Sanskrit literary corpus, but śleṣa was a popular technique among authors writing in other languages, as...

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