This British scholar has won recognition as one of the best 20th-century experts on folklore as well as classical poetry and prose. The present book is exploring both the contents and the structural and linguistic peculiarities of epos at large, beginning with that of ancient Greek and finishing with the Romance and German poetry of the Middle Ages. The author’s precise and clear-cut style of writing makes the book valuable not only to the specialists in the field, but also to the broad readership, interested in European literature.

Professor Darnton is one of the eminent American historians, who is writing about 18th-century culture at large – the culture of peasants and craftsmen, the bourgeoisie and bureaucracy, Encyclopaedists and Romanticists. His essays combine historical facts with their subtle appreciation and an insight into the psychology of the characters described. The thrilling plots and a peculiarly French elegance of style make the book especially worth reading.

Natalie Zemon Davis is an eminent historian, Professor Emeritus of Princeton University, the author of, among other works, The Return of Martin Guerre (also translated into Russian, Moscow, 1990). The book Women on the Margins deals with three singular personalities, whose lives disprove our idea of the 17th century as a homogeneous cultural block. Translated from English by Tatiana Dobronitskaya.

Rene Girard was born in France in 1923, but has lived in the USA since 1947. He began as a literary scholar, yet his breakthrough in the 70s was made in the field of philosophy and anthropology. “The Violence of the Sacred” (1972) has become one of the key works of modern anthropology, which had a great impact not only on historians but also on philosophers and men of letters. Striving to discover the origin of religion, Girard refers the reader to various sources, from African myths through Greek tragedies to the Old Testament, and finally arrives at a solution to his problem common to all human societies.

In 1926 returns us to the sights, sounds and smells of bygone days as Stanford University Professor Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht recreates the bars and boxing, palatial cinemas and lifts, automobiles and aeroplanes, bullfighting and movie stars, jazz and even the triumphant “resurrection” of Tutankhamun. We re-experience the tensions, so evident at that time, between the individual and the collective; the past and the present; the male and the female. From such fascinating and diverse viewpoints as Berlin, Buenos Aires, Paris and New York, Gumbrecht studies everyday life in Spain, Italy, France, Latin America, Germany and the USA. Wandering from one topic to another, the reader is free to roam at will, undertaking a multitude of fascinating journeys through this curiously compiled volume. As we travel, we are slowly engulfed in the way of life, thoughts and entertainments of those who lived in 1926. Following the movements of an unseen loom as it weaves the living tissue of history, we find ourselves face to face with a different time.

In this, one of his latest books, the Stanford University Professor offers an original approach to the humanities, combining a review of the theoretical achievements of the last thirty years with a forecast for future research. The aim of the book is to re-evaluate the production of knowledge in this area, with a particular focus on reviving the effects of sensual, bodily presence. Without these, the author feels, our experiencing of culture can, at best, be incomplete, and at worst, be faulty. Well-known for his independent thinking, Gumbrecht speaks out against the tendency in modern culture to abandon the possibility of approaching the world through presence.

This book by the writer and philosopher Alexander Piatigorsky should be seen only as an introduction to the study of the philosophy of Buddhism. It does not attempt to deal with Buddhism as a religion, or with the Buddhist view of the world, or Buddhist art and culture. Neither should it be seen as an introduction to the history of Buddhist philosophy. Through canonical and non-canonical texts, Piatigorsky offers several cross-sections of philosophy, each a complete image of a particular state of Buddhist philosophical thought. Together, they present a synchronized picture of the general state of Buddhist philosophy, as seen by the contemporary philosophical thinker.

The ideological context of the school of Russian formalism is reconstructed by Petersburg academic Ilona Svetlikova, who reveals formalism’s direct descendence from turn-of-the-century psychology. The new science of psychology revolutionized the humanities, and had a seminal influence on the formalist school, although this fact was later repeatedly denied. In this book, the discovery of the psychological origins of formalistic concepts allows Svetlikova to see formalism not as an isolated phenomenon, but as part of the European intellectual history of the early 20th century. Key formalist texts by Jakobson, Tynianov and others are used as evidence for the psychological foundations of formalism.

The British scholar Francis A. Yates (1899-1981) devoted herself to the study of the Renaissance and was one of the most prominent figures in the brilliant research centre known as the Warburg Institute. The present book (originally published in 1964) became the first in her series of works giving a fresh insight into the evolution of European culture in early modern time. Who was Giordano Bruno? Why was he burnt alive? What did he actually mean by his mysterious writings? All these questions are given detailed and quite extraordinary answers. Yates’ book can be read on a few different planes: as a clear-cut biography, as an introduction to the history of the Renaissance magic, or as a study of intellectual preconditions of the 17th-century scientific revolution.