The Broken Spell The Romance Genre in Late Mughal India

The worldviews that underpinned romances, and the purposes that romances were meant to fulfill, are thereby inspected. Chapters are devoted to the opposition and interpenetration of the "fantastic" romance and "factual" historiography (tarikh), to romances' function in client-patron relationships via panegyrics (madh), and to romances' restagings of moral arguments rehearsed in ethical manuals (akhlaq).