Forty Bosnian traditional ballads are now available to the English reader in this bilingual edition offering a selection of never before translated or published materials from Harvard University's Parry Collection. These songs were performed by Bosnian women and gathered in the Gacko region of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1930s.

Pearls are glistening, solid object created within the tissue of a living mollusc or other shelled animals. Pearls of the highest quality are categorised as gemstones and considered to be objects of beauty in many cultures. This vintage book explores the world of pearls and pearl farming, giving an outline of its history from ancient times to the developments of modern pearling life. Contents include: “Pearl-culture and Pearl-faming”, “Historical”, “Ancient Ideas of the Origin and Virtues of Pearls”, “Pearl-bearers”, “Mother-of-Pearl Shell”, “The Origin and Formation of Pearls”, “The North-West Australian Fishery”, “The Torres Straights Fishery”, “Pearling Life at the Present Day”, “Cevlon Pearl Fisheries”, etc. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with the original text and artwork.

The laments of captive women found in extant Athenian tragedy constitute a fundamentally subversive aspect of Greek drama. In performances supported by and intended for the male citizens of Athens, the songs of the captive women at the Dionysia gave a voice to classes who otherwise would have been marginalized and silenced in Athenian society: women, foreigners, and the enslaved. The Captive Woman's Lament in Greek Tragedy addresses the possible meanings ancient audiences might have attached to these songs. Casey Dué challenges long-held assumptions about the opposition between Greeks and barbarians in Greek thought by suggesting that, in viewing the plight of the captive women, Athenian audiences extended pity to those least like themselves. Dué asserts that tragic playwrights often used the lament to create an empathetic link that blurred the line between Greek and barbarian. After a brief overview of the role of lamentation in both modern and classical traditions, Dué focuses on the dramatic portrayal of women captured in the Trojan War, tracing their portrayal through time from the Homeric epics to Euripides' Athenian stage. The author shows how these laments evolved in their significance with the growth of the Athenian Empire. She concludes that while the Athenian polis may have created a merciless empire outside the theater, inside the theater they found themselves confronted by the essential similarities between themselves and those they sought to conquer.

Using an interdiciplinary approach, this book brings together work in the fields of history, literary studies, music, and architecture to examine the place of folklore and representations of 'the people' in the development of nations across Europe during the 19th century.

In this part, Rusmir Mahmutcehajic introduces readers to the traditional substance of Stone Sleeper, in the context of what he calls "perennial philosophy." From that perspective, prophecy, being the source of perennial wisdom, is set above poetry. In some poetry, however, prophetic wisdom and poetic pronouncement exist inseparably. Stone Sleeper is an example of that mutual coexistence. --

The author shows that understanding of femininity in ancient Greece can be expanded by going beyond poetry composed by women poets like Sappho to explore girls' and women's choral songs from the archaic period, songs for female choruses and characters in tragedy, and lyrical representations of women's rituals and cults. The book discusses poetry as performance, relevant kinds and genres of poetry, the definition and scope of "woman's song" as a mode, partheneia (maidens' songs) and the girls' chorus, lyric in the drama, echoes and imitations of archaic woman's song in Hellenistic poetry, and inferences about the differences between male and female authors. It demonstrates that woman's song is ultimately best understood as the product of a male-dominated culture but that feminine stereotypes, while refined by male poets, are interrogated and shifted by female poets. The book traces the evolution of female-voice lyric from 600 to 100 BCE and includes Alcman, Sappho, Corinna, Pindar, other lyric poets, lyric in the drama, and the Hellenistic poets Nossis, Theocritus, and Bion.

Russian rural women have been depicted as victims of oppressive patriarchy, celebrated as symbols of inherent female strength, and extolled as the original source of a great world culture. Throughout the years of collectivization, industrialization, and World War II, women played major roles in the evolution of the Russian village. But how do they see themselves? What do their stories, songs, and customs reveal about their values, desires, and motivations? Based upon nearly three decades of fieldwork, from 1983 to 2010, The Worlds of Russian Rural Women follows three generations of Russian women and shows how they alternately preserve, discard, and rework the cultural traditions of their forebears to suit changing needs and self-conceptions. In a major contribution to the study of folklore, Laura J. Olson and Svetlana Adonyeva document the ways that women’s tales of traditional practices associated with marriage, childbirth, and death reflect both upholding and transgression of social norms. Their romance songs, satirical ditties, and healing and harmful magic reveal the complexity of power relations in the Russian villages.