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The Oxford Handbook of Slavic and East European Folklore provides a broad survey of the folklore of the Slavic and East European world: Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltics, as well as Central and Southeastern Europe. The volume contains forty-three chapters that offer an array of distinctive yet comparable traditions and genres. It includes folklore of the life cycle; calendrical-cycle traditions, magic, and folk belief; folktales, epic, lyric songs, proverbs, and jokes; local Romani, Muslim, and Jewish musical genres; and material culture. The handbook presents an assortment of oral traditions for an audience of folklorists, students, and scholars who wish to explore the rich expressive culture of the Slavic and East European world.
This book gives an analytical review of the history of witch-hunt historiography. So far not much attention has been paid to how the European witch-hunts have been studied and explained in some 150 years of academic research on the issue. The history of the approaches and explanations in witch-hunt research fundamentally contributes not only to our understanding of the bizarre phenomenon in European history but also contributes to understanding of cultural as well as academic trends which heavily direct any research even when scholars are not cognisant of their underlying premises. How and why the picture of witch-hunts has been changing in scholarly works and text books is as illuminating an issue as the proper explanations offered by the research works. Contributors include: Rune Blix Hagen, Ronald Hutton, Gunnar W. Knutsen, Marianna G. Muravyeva, Marko Nenonen, Raisa Maria Toivo, Charles Zika
This comprehensive bibliography covers writings about vampires and related creatures from the 19th century to the present. More than 6,000 entries document the vampire's penetration of Western culture, from scholarly discourse, to popular culture, politics and cook books. Sections by topic list works covering various aspects, including general sources, folklore and history, vampires in literature, music and art, metaphorical vampires and the contemporary vampire community. Vampires from film and television--from Bela Lugosi's Dracula to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood and the Twilight Saga--are well represented.
Merezhkovsky's bold claim that "all Russian literature is, to a certain degree, a struggle with the temptation of demonism" is undoubtedly justified. And yet, despite its evident centrality to Russian culture, the unique and fascinating phenomenon of Russian literary demonism has so far received little critical attention. This substantial collection fills the gap. A comprehensive analytical introduction by the editor is follwed by a series of fourteen essays, written by eminent scholars in their fields. The first part explores the main shaping contexts of literary demonism: the Russian Orthodox and folk tradition, the demonization of historical figures, and views of art as intrinsically demonic. The second part traces the development of a literary tradition of demonism in the works of authors ranging from Pushkin and Lermontov, Gogol and Dostoevsky, through to the poets and prose writers of modernism (including Blok, Akhmatova, Bely, Sologub, Rozanov, Zamiatin), and through to the end of the 20th century.
Crucial to the world history of folkloristics is this key study, first published in 1992, of the development of folklore study in the Soviet Union. Nowhere else has political ideology been so heavily involved with folklore scholarship. Professor Howell has examined in depth the institutional development of folkloristics in the Soviet Union in the first half of the twentieth century, concentrating especially upon the transition from pre-revolutionary Russian to Soviet Marxist folkloristics. The study of folklore moved from narrator studies to the description of the relationship of lore to larger contexts of social groups and social classes. Showing an exceptional knowledge of Russian, political theory and folkloristics, Dana Howell provides a valuable window into the rise of folkloristics in a country undergoing almost unprecedented changes in social and political conditions.
The series Religion and Society (RS) contributes to the exploration of religions as social systems– both in Western and non-Western societies; in particular, it examines religions in their differentiation from, and intersection with, other cultural systems, such as art, economy, law and politics. Due attention is given to paradigmatic case or comparative studies that exhibit a clear theoretical orientation with the empirical and historical data of religion and such aspects of religion as ritual, the religious imagination, constructions of tradition, iconography, or media. In addition, the formation of religious communities, their construction of identity, and their relation to society and the wider public are key issues of this series.
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Why do people consider aesthetic qualities as well as utilitarian ones in the making of everyday objects? Why do they maintain traditions? What is the nature of their creative process? These are some of the larger questions addressed by Michael Owen Jones in his book on craftsmen in the Cumberland Mountains of eastern Kentucky. Concentrating on the work of one man, woodworker and chairmaker Chester Cornett, Jones not only describes the tools and techniques employed by Cornett but also his aspirations and values. Cornett possessed a deep knowledge of his materials and a mastery of construction methods. Some of his chairs represent not objects of utility but aesthetic developments of the chair form. Cornett sought to cope with the problems of his life, Jones maintains; their massiveness provided a sense of security, the virtuosity of their design and construction, a feeling of self-esteem. Jones also compares other area craftsmen and their views about their work.
This book examines folk music and dance revival movements in Russia, exploring why this folk culture has come to represent Russia, how it has been approached and produced, and why memory and tradition, in these particular forms, have taken on particular significance in different periods. Above all it shows how folk "tradition" in Russia is an artificial cultural construct, which is periodically reinvented, and it demonstrates in particular how the "folk revival" has played a key role in strengthening Russian national consciousness in the post-Soviet period.