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173 кн.
The aristocrat who wrote this vigorous political play eschewed sentimentality in favor of realistic characterization and forceful action. It is 316 BCE, one year after Chandra·gupta Maurya, aided by his subtle minister Chánakya, has seized the kingdom of Mágadha from the last king of the Nanda dynasty. Rákshasa, Nanda’s incorruptible minister, flees abroad and plots his vengeance, while Chánakya seeks to win him over to honor Chandra·gupta...
| Автор | Vishakha-datta |
Devil worship, black magic, and witchcraft have long captivated anthropologists as well as the general public. In this volume, Jean La Fontaine explores the intersection of expert and lay understandings of evil and the cultural forms that evil assumes. The chapters touch on public scares about devil-worship, misconceptions about human sacrifice and the use of body parts in healing practices, and mistaken accusations of children practicing witchcraft. Together, these cases demonstrate that...
| Автор | Jean La Fontaine |
Inuit hunting traditions are rich in perceptions, practices and stories relating to animals and human beings. The authors examine key figures such as the raven, an animal that has a central place in Inuit culture as a creator and a trickster, and qupirruit , a category consisting of insects and other small life forms. After these non-social and inedible animals, they discuss the dog, the companion of the hunter, and the fellow hunter, the bear, considered to resemble a human being. A discussion...
| Автор | Frédéric Laugrand |
Departing from an ethnographic collection in London, From Storeroom to Stage traces the journey of its artefacts back to the Romanian villages where they were made 70 years ago, and to other places where similar objects are still in use. The book explores the role that material culture plays in the production of value and meaning by examining how folk objects are mobilized in national ideologies, transmissions of personal and family memory, museological discourses, and artistic acts.
| Автор | Alexandra Urdea |
Even before Bram Stoker immortalized Transylvania as the homeland of his fictional Count Dracula, the figure of the vampire was inextricably tied to Eastern Europe in the popular imagination. Drawing on a wealth of heretofore neglected sources, this book offers a fascinating account of how vampires—whose various incarnations originally emerged from the folk traditions of societies throughout the world—became identified with such a specific region. It demonstrates that the modern conception of...
| Автор | Thomas M. Bohn |
The Saga of the Volsungs is an Icelandic epic of special interest to admirers of Richard Wagner, who drew heavily upon this Norse source in writing his Ring Cycle and a primary source for writers of fantasy such as J. R. R. Tolkien and romantics such as William Morris.A trove of traditional lore, it tells of love, jealousy, vengeance, war, and the mythic deeds of the dragonslayer, Sigurd the Volsung.Byock's comprehensive introduction explores the history, legends, and myths contained in...
| Автор | Группа авторов |
Gentlemen and Amazons traces the nineteenth-century genesis and development of an important contemporary myth about human origins: that of an original prehistoric matriarchy. Cynthia Eller explores the intellectual history of the myth, which arose from male scholars who mostly wanted to vindicate the patriarchal family model as a higher stage of human development. Eller tells the stories these men told, analyzes the gendered assumptions they made, and provides the necessary context for...
| Автор | Cynthia Eller |
In this new translation of Hesiod, Barry B. Powell gives an accessible, modern verse rendering of these vibrant texts, essential to an understanding of early Greek myth and society. With stunning color images that help bring to life the contents of the poems and notes that explicate complex passages, Powell’s fresh renditions provide an exciting introduction to the culture of the ancient Greeks.<BR /><BR /> This is the definitive translation and guide for students and...
| Автор | Hesiod |
During the archaic and classical periods, Greek ideas about the dead evolved in response to changing social and cultural conditions—most notably changes associated with the development of the polis, such as funerary legislation, and changes due to increased contacts with cultures of the ancient Near East. In <i>Restless Dead</i>, Sarah Iles Johnston presents and interprets these changes, using them to build a complex picture of the way in which the society of the dead reflected that...
| Автор | Sarah Iles Johnston |
This collection of exemplary essays by internationally recognized scholars examines the fairy tale from historical, folkloristic, literary, and psychoanalytical points of view. For generations of children and adults, fairy tales have encapsulated social values, often through the use of fixed characters and situations, to a far greater extent than any other oral or literary form. In many societies, fairy tales function as a paradigm both for understanding society and for developing individual...
| Автор | Группа авторов |
The pursuit of health and wellness has become a fundamental and familiar part of everyday life in America. We are surrounded by an enticing world of products, practices, and promotions assuring health and happiness—cereal boxes claim that their contents can reduce the risk of heart disease, bars of aromatherapy soap seek to wash away our stresses, newspapers celebrate the wonders of the latest superfoods and herbal remedies. No longer confined to the domain of Western medicine,...
| Автор | Kimberly J. Lau |
Postmodern Fairy Tales seeks to understand the fairy tale not as children's literature but within the broader context of folklore and literary studies. It focuses on the narrative strategies through which women are portrayed in four classic stories: «Snow White,» «Little Red Riding Hood,» «Beauty and the Beast,» and «Bluebeard.» Bacchilega traces the oral sources of each tale, offers a provocative interpretation of contemporary versions by Angela Carter, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme,...
| Автор | Cristina Bacchilega |
Not much can be known about the life of Maximianus, who has been called «the last of the Roman poets,» beyond what can be inferred from his poetry. He was most likely a native of Tuscany, probably lived until the middle of the sixth century, and, at an advanced age, went as a diplomat to the emperor's court at Constantinople. A. M. Juster has translated the complete elegies of Maximianus faithfully but not literally, resulting in texts that work beautifully as poetry in English....
| Автор | Maximianus |
David Hufford's work exploring the experiential basis for belief in the supernatural, focusing here on the so-called Old Hag experience, a psychologically disturbing event in which a victim claims to have encountered some form of malign entity while dreaming (or awake). Sufferers report feeling suffocated, held down by some «force,» paralyzed, and extremely afraid. The experience is surprisingly common: the author estimates that approximately 15 percent of people undergo this event at some...
| Автор | David J. Hufford |
In the classic rags-to-riches fairy tale a penniless heroine (or hero), with some magic help, marries a royal prince (or princess) and rises to wealth. Received opinion has long been that stories like these originated among peasants, who passed them along by word of mouth from one place to another over the course of centuries. In a bold departure from conventional fairy tale scholarship, Ruth B. Bottigheimer asserts that city life and a single individual played a central role in the creation and...
| Автор | Ruth B. Bottigheimer |
Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 B.C.), known in English as Virgil, was perhaps the single greatest poet of the Roman empire—a friend to the emperor Augustus and the beneficiary of wealthy and powerful patrons. Most famous for his epic of the founding of Rome, the Aeneid , he wrote two other collections of poems: the Georgics and the Bucolics , or Eclogues . The Eclogues were Virgil's first published poems. Ancient sources say that he spent three years composing and revising...
| Автор | Virgil |
The Nuosu people, who were once overlords of vast tracts of farmland and forest in the uplands of southern Sichuan and neighboring provinces, are the largest division of the Yi ethnic group in southwest China. Their creation epic plots the origins of the cosmos, the sky and earth, and the living beings of land and water. This translation is a rare example in English of Indigenous ethnic literature from China.Transmitted in oral and written forms for centuries among the Nuosu, The Book of...
| Автор | Группа авторов |
The legends of ancient Britain retain a profound allure for readers around the world, assuring a warm reception for this introduction to the colorful pageant of Celtic myth. Its wondrous tales range from the oft-told deeds of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table to the less-familiar adventures of the mighty Finn and his Fenians, Ulster's Champions of the Red Branch, and other figures from the Gaelic pantheon. Tracing the exploits of kings and saints back to their earliest origins, the...
| Автор | Charles Squire |
Any investigation into vampire legends leads inevitably to the works of Montague Summers (1880–1948), whose research and writings in the 1920s established him as the subject’s preeminent authority. This study examines vampire lore in fantastic detail, constituting a record of folk beliefs unequaled in its sheer scope and depth. It features all the apparatus of an academic work, including footnotes and references to rare source documents, and it addresses such issues as how...
| Автор | Montague Summers |
This fascinating and informative compendium of Native American lore was assembled by one of twentieth-century America's premier ethnographer/anthropologists. Hartley Burr Alexander recounts the continent's myths chronologically and region-by-region, offering a remarkably wide range of nomadic sagas, animist myths, cosmogonies and creation myths, end-time prophecies, and other traditional tales.The stories begin in the far North, among Norsemen and Eskimos, and range through the land of...
| Автор | Hartley Burr Alexander |
A venerable resource for more than a century, Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar is still regarded by students and teachers as the finest Latin reference grammar available. Concise, comprehensive, and well organized, it is unrivaled in depth and clarity, placing a wealth of advice on usage, vocabulary, diction, composition, and syntax within easy reach of Latin scholars at all levels. This sourcebook's three-part treatment starts with words and forms, covering parts of speech,...
| Автор | James B Greenough |
In the ancient world, men and women joined cults known as Mysteries to unite with the deities of the otherworld and achieve eternal life. The most important of the Mysteries existed for two millennia at the village of Eleusis. Its deities were Demeter and Persephone, interchangeable in their roles as mother and daughter. The initiations and other rituals of this goddess-based cult were a profound secret: divulging information was punishable by death. For centuries, scholars have probed the...
| Автор | Carl A. P. Ruck |
First published in 1892, this vintage book looks at religious, mystical, and mythological influences on architecture throughout history and from all over the world, exploring in detail similarities, design, purpose, and much more. Profusely illustrated throughout, “Architecture, Mysticism and Myth” will appeal to those with an interest in religious architecture and would make for a worthy addition to any collection. Contents include: “The World Fabric”, “The Microcosmos”, “Four Square”, “At the...
| Автор | W. R. Lethaby |
“The Study of Imagination” is a brand new collection of classic essays written by various authors on the subject of fairy tales, mythology, and folk-Lore. Contents include: “Fairy Tales, by G. K. Chesterton”, “The Fantastic Imagination, by George Macdonald”, “The Worth of Fairy Tales, by Laura F. Kready”, “Storyology, by Benjamin Taylor”, “A Harvest of Irish Folk-Lore, by John Fiske”, “On the Philosophy of Mythology, by F. Max Müller”, “Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties, by William Henderson”,...
| Автор | Various |