The essays gathered in this volume are devoted to different aspects of the reception of Humanism and the Renaissance in Slavic countries. They mark the beginning of a dialogue among scholars of different Slavic languages and literatures, in search of the ways in which the entire Slavic world – albeit to varying degrees – has participated from the very beginning in European cultural transformations, and not simply by sharing some characteristics of the new currents, but by building a new identity in harmony with the changes of the time. By overcoming the dominant paradigm, which sees all cultural manifestations as part of a separate ‘national’ linguistic, literary and artistic canon, this volume is intended to be the first step in outlining some ideas and suggestions in view of the creation, in the future, of an atlas that maps the relevance of Humanism and the Renaissance in the Slavic world.
This volume, edited by scholars from diverse backgrounds, stems from the original convergence of various geo-cultural viewpoints on the reception of East Slavic cultures and literatures (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarussian, Soviet): European viewpoints are juxtaposed with those of the Japanese, Chinese, Israeli areas. The volume offers a broad look at the history of the perception of these literatures in Europe, Italy, and East Asia (with special attention to their reception in Japan and China). Contacts, influences, meditations, and difficulties in the perception of literary and cultural phenomena are the subject of original comparative analyses. The vitality with which Slavic-Eastern literatures have found echoes in very distant environments, but also the evolution of the self-perception of Ukrainian literature over time, are among the topics.
This book contains a synchronic grammar and grammatical dictionaries of Old Church Slavic. The framework is based on a substantially revised version of the classical descriptive methodology. The intent is to improve on the classical monographs by Vaillant, Diels, Lunt in the direction of utmost completeness, explicitness, and deliberate consistency between the grammatical structure, the corpus of texts (limited to the seven oldest OCS manuscripts), and the dictionaries. The grammar is intended as a set of rules that provide a complete characterization of any OCS wordform. Peculiarities in the language of each source are described as systematic departures from canonical OCS, a conventional constructed variety primarily described by the grammar. The book is addressed to linguists working in Slavic studies, as well as to specialists in the general theory of grammar, especially phonologists and morphologists.
Wakelin uses new methods and theories in the history of reading to uncover fresh information about the design, ownership, and marginalia of books in a neglected period in English literary history. This is the first book to identify the origins of the humanist tradition in England in the 15th century.
This volume shows the panorama of the contemporary studies of the Polish Renaissance, presented here in the Italian and transalpine context, taking into consideration its characteristics. An important aspect of this volume is the specification of the research needs and the definition of new directions of studies and their methodology. A large, multiethnic and multireligious state, which was Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodów) shaped its modern identity in the sixteenth century. This period gave rise to the flowering of literature and art, creating the Golden Age of Polish culture. The ideas of Renaissance humanism proved to be vitally attractive for the domestic elites and contributed to the creation of the foundations of the political system of the Commonwealth, becoming its pride--a republic with an elected king, where both passive and active electoral rights were vested in the entire Gentry Nation. The Latin Culture of the Renaissance became also an integrating factor for this multilingual state organism, and Latin, together with Polish was the main medium of communication among nobility (who accounted for about 10 percent of the inhabitants of the Republic). The disintegration of this commonwealth, the loss of independence for more than a century (1795-1918), and then loss of sovereignty for another half of a century (1939-1989) and then isolation between Poland and the West resulted in the fact that the culture of this area was not included in the studies of the European Renaissance, which were commenced in the nineteenth century. This gap has been seen until today in the Western course books and more general overviews. The purpose of this volume is, at least to a limited degree, to fill in the lack of scientific analyses of the Polish Renaissance in western languages and also to invite foreign scholars to a debate about Polish humanistic literature. Particular chapters concentrate on the following issues: From the History of the Renaissance Idea; The State of Research on the Renaissance Humanism: Poland Case; Editing of Primary Sources; Old and Contemporary Translation Studies; The Renaissance Genres (Theory and Practice).
Contents: Humanism in 16th-century Hungary - Humanism in the 16th-century Low Countries - Nicolaus Olahus's literary background - Rhetoric in the Renaissance - Literature as ars rhetorica - Olahus's poetry: sources and generic repertoire - Olahus's works in prose - The Carmina: description and history of the manuscripts and previous editions.
A documentary profile of the life of Frank Dux, an American martial arts fighter who was the inspiration for Jean Claude Van Damme's 1988 breakthrough film 'Bloodsport'.
A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.
