Books by Kevin McGrath

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.

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.