New open-access book Literary transcreation as a Jain practice, edited by Eva De Clercq (Ghent Centre for Buddhist Studies) , Heleen De Jonckheere, and Simon Winant, has been published as Volume 13 in the series Beiträge zur kulturwissenschaftlichen Süd- und Ostasienforschung.
This volume developed out of a conference, “Literary Transcreation as a Jain Practice,” originally scheduled for May 2020, but due to the global COVID pandemic, it was postponed to September 2022. The idea for the conference arose from the shared research interests of the conference organisers and this volume’s editors whose work on Jain narrative literature prompted them to ask what conclusions may be drawn from the many creative engagements by Jains with existing literary objects, and how these may contribute to the field of South Asian Studies.
A vast corpus of Jain texts lies unexamined in manuscript libraries, several of them new versions of earlier works. Though the prevalence of literary transcreation in Jain communities is striking, it is by no means a practice exclusive to them. The field of South Asian Studies has increasingly dealt with the creative engagement of authors with an authoritative literary object. Although these studies have brought to the fore important conclusions, the Jains as a literary community have remained absent from these discussions. This volume addresses this gap, highlighting the influential role of Jain authors in the multilingual literary world of South Asia.