Javanese Literature - Surakarta manuscripts

Nancy Florida, Vol 1:

 

p. 17: "The manuscripts in the Surakarta collections comprise some 5,000 texts inscribed on nearly 70,000 pages of paper bound into the over 2,100 volumes of manuscripts."

 

p.16: "The literature inscribed in the Surakarta manuscripts, on the other hand, tends to articulate more contemporary (eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-century) concerns. Among these manuscriptions are myriad histories of Java (including journals of writers' presents, histories of their immediate and not-so-immediate pasts, and "modern" re-writings of ancient histories which look forward to various postcolonial futures), a wide variety of Islamic religious tracts, and countless compendia of useful local knowledge."

 

p.17 "Among other things, these Surakarta manuscripts written in and of the Javanese past include historical chronicles and documents, political correspondence, extensive court diaries, prophecies, classical poetry, refined moralistic tracts, erotic lore, treatises on Islamic theology and law, sufi speculative lyrics, scripts for shadow-puppet plays, compendia of court love, and manuals of magical and divinatory practice."

 

In the catelogues themselves (for both Vol 1 and 2; total there should be 4 volumes for just Surakarta manuscripts), different forms of histories constitute the biggest category.

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