{"product_id":"the-unraveling-heart-by-madhuri-deshmukh-9780231217927","title":"The Unraveling Heart","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWomen's songs of the grind mill are among the oldest oral traditions in South Asia. They have been sung to accompany a daily household labour, making flour using a stone hand mill, for many centuries. Even today, grind mill songs are still well known in Maharashtra, testifying to the endurance of a remarkable genre. Yet these songs have long been understood through sociological or anthropological lenses, treated as entirely separate from literary culture.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis groundbreaking book shows that women's songs of the grind mill played a foundational role in the vernacular turn to making literature in Marathi between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. Madhuri Deshmukh demonstrates that women's songs developed alongside and in intimate conversation with Marathi written literature, shaping the poetic structures and motifs of the bhakti tradition.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eDrawing on aesthetic categories from the songs themselves, she calls for understanding these artfully crafted compositions as oral poetry in a lyric mode, underscoring that women describe their songs as an \u003cem\u003eunraveling of the heart\u003c\/em\u003e while they compare written poetry to weaving. Deshmukh argues that women poets, Mahadaise and Janabai, were at the forefront of vernacularization, challenging common literary-historical narratives that neglect the role of communities excluded by elite regimes of writing.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eConsidering what songs say about texts and what texts say about songs, \u003cem\u003eThe Unraveling Heart\u003c\/em\u003e offers new insight into the importance of labour and gender to aesthetics and develops a novel approach to the concept of the literary.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47307373609196,"sku":"9780231217927","price":70.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/8235973482270.jpg?v=1771074238","url":"https:\/\/bookhero.co.nz\/products\/the-unraveling-heart-by-madhuri-deshmukh-9780231217927","provider":"Book Hero","version":"1.0","type":"link"}