Мария Пилева

The paper examines the forewords and afterwords and their influence on the reception of Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe during different periods of its publication in Bulgarian. Approved as a certain genre form during the time of Bulgarian National Revival, when there was a limited number of articles and papers on specific literary or political issues, the preface was loaded with some extra features. Through its presentations of the cultural context in which the different translation of the novel appeared we can trace some of the stages in the critical perception of the work. Afterwords of the novel appeared much later - after 1944 - and operated in the other ideological environment trying to correct the interpretation. The aim of the presented paper is also to identify some important moments in the development of these paratexts with their first references to the author, the importance of the work, its impact and its reception in the light of changing social and political conditions.

The book „Fiction in the archives. The selection of facts and documents in scientific research“ (2024) contains articles from the scientific conference with the same title held in March 2023 at Sofia University. Compilers of the collection are Andriana Spasova, Anna Alexieva, Boyka Ilieva, Nadezhda Alexandrova, Nikolay Zhelev, Slaveya Nedelcheva. The collection aims to raise the topic of the two-way interaction between fact and fiction, myth and history, document and literature.

In 2025, the journal Literaturna missal (Literary thought) is going to publish an issue dedicated to the interdisciplinary topic "Sound and Text". The issue will include articles in English and Bulgarian. The complex interrelations between sound and text have a history as long as literature itself, dating back from the primary unstable form of oral poetry, through the secondary writing forms of oral poetry, up till today’s digital audio-visual forms (Paul Zumthor. Oral Poetry: An Introduction). Sound should be considered in the broadest possible sense, and in many literary and cultural forms it is practically inseparable from the text. The interconnected forms of sound and text are positioned in a broad intercultural context, as these forms develop from the verse of Antiquity to the present day. The research could focus on acoustic and textological issues of the Medieval Corpus and Early Modernity to the 20th century. It can adopt historical or theoretical approach. From the perspective of intermediality, the research could analyze the sound-text interaction in the historical avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes. The complex relations between the two are crucial also for many other realms of contemporary cultural studies (electronic audio literature, film, theatre, performance, popular music, video games, digital media, etc.). Their theoretical and historical configurations call for examination from various perspectives.

If we view literature and law as different spheres of language usage or classify them as different “language games” (Ludwig Wittgenstein), we would probably jump to the conclusion that they cannot explain each other. Despite the different conventions of law and literature, however, the two have been inextricably linked since ancient times and sometimes in complex and mediated ways. Poetry and legal proceedings have common rhetorical roots from a time when both were public attractions. Law and literature have been opposed in social and historical aspect multiple times. A number of lawsuits have been organized against certain literary works; lists of “banned books“ were prepared. There are also literary representations of fictional trials and laws, of fictional states with sinister or absurd legislation. The field of critical theory also contains both oppositions and examples of agreement between the two fields. The issue of the journal is being prepared in partnership with the seminar "Literature and Law" of the "Ethical Studies Section", Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at BAS and the "Faculty of Slavic Studies", Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski".