review

The review of the monograph by A. Vacheva tracks how trivial topic of female poetry in Bulgaria interwar period, unfolds in the fundamental issues of the women writing in general. The study of Vacheva ends with intractable interrelation of gender and ideology, since it tends to conceive the female experience in writing, fixing the validation and deletion of the current Bulgarian writers from the canon, which is a priori powerful, patriarchal and similar to male-subordinated. The study concerns also the essential problem for the historiography of women's writing and creativity in our country. By reviving the picture of Bulgarian literature from the most stable decade in recent history (the 30s of XX century), a decade marked by female identity - urban - bourgeois, A. Vacheva actually describes a history of identification and recognition of significant figures in our literature produced by women. In this sense, her research could be defined as testing for entries and exits, to legitimize or to erase the author's characters of the prestigious literary field.

Review of a collections of ethnological studies on collective memories about socialist period of Bulgarians from different parts of the country and on different topics. The problem of cultural memory/culture of memory is fundamental for the modern humanities. The matter of memory and especially its ambiguity, serving different scientific disciplines, creates a long and fruitful discussion joined by Bulgarian researchers in the end of the 1990s. and it is successfully continued in this book.

The review is dedicated to the monograph of Violeta Ruseva "Bulgarian symbolism: modus of distinctness" (Veliko Tarnovo, 2014) - a respectable literary historical study of Bulgarian symbolism, not seen as a complete artistic phenomenon, but as a "mobile hermeneutical field." The main aspect in the study is the denial of chronology and the trust in the historical, in "laconic fact." The symbolism is not tracked in its exhaustion and completeness but through emblematic poetry books and notorious periodical synthesis ("Vezni" magazine) - as stored, transported and newly regenerated cultural memory in the decade after the Wars.

National Thought in Europe by Joep Leerssen critically analyzes the growth of nationalism from its beginnings in medieval ethnic prejudice to the romantic era"s belief in a national soul. A fertile pan-European exchange of ideas, often rooted in literature, led to a notion of a nation"s cultural individuality that transformed the map of Europe. This revue presents the monograph focusing on the possibilities to apply some of the ideas of the author on Balkan and Bulgarian phenomena.

Stephen Greenblatt tells the story of how Poggio Bracciolini, a 15th-century papal emissary, and obsessive book hunter, saved the last copy of the Roman poet Lucretius's On the Nature of Things from near-terminal neglect in a German monastery, thus reintroducing important ideas that sparked the modern age. The author analyzes this development in a very broad cultural and philosophical scale. This review presents the monograph of the so-called New Historicism and its possible applications in Bulgarian scholarship.