The fifth volume in this series of long essays in the field of Slavic letters and intellectual history presents three studies. Thomas Butler has analyzed the attacks of Vuk Karadžić on the language of the popular novelist Milovan Vidaković. George Siegel discusses a theme of importance to many Russian writers in “The Fallen Woman in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature.” And in “The Poetry of Georgij Ivanov,” Irina Agushi presents the first comprehensive analysis of one of the most gifted and successful of the emigré Russian poets.

This limited edition contains the critical texts of eight long oral epics from four bards of northern Bosnia, the northern most predominantly Muslim district in Europe. Sung with the accompaniment of the picked tambura rather than the bowed gusle that is familiar elsewhere in the Yugoslav tradition, the epos in northern Bosnia was often strophic or stanzaic rather than stichic. This volume is the first publication in the more than century-old scholarship on South Slavic oral traditions to take note of that fact, and to document it with specific texts. The editor's Prolegomena include detailed discussions of the principles of rhythm in this epos, the sources of the tales in it, and extensive comparative commentaries linking the eight narratives with those found in other Yugoslav towns, especially with the tradition of Avdo Međedović at Bijelo Polje.

In researching this collection, Milman Parry set out to test the theories he had evolved on oral epic, theories that were to introduce a new era of Homeric scholarship. In the Balkans, one of the few areas where a living tradition of oral heroic poetry was still to be found, he observed firsthand how unlettered singers composed their poems, and collected more than 1200 hours of poetic performance from the most experienced bards. Comprising representative texts and translations from the Parry Collection, this series records the South Slavic tradition.

First published in 1960, Albert B. Lord’s The Singer of Tales remains the fundamental study of the distinctive techniques and aesthetics of oral epic poetry. Based upon pathbreaking fieldwork conducted in the 1930s and 1950s among oral epic singers of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia, Lord analyzes in impressive detail the techniques of oral composition in performance. He explores the consequences of this analysis for the interpretation of numerous works of traditional verbal art, including—in addition to South Slavic epic songs—the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland, and the Byzantine epic Digenis Akritas. A cardinal text for the study of oral traditions, The Singer of Tales also represents an exemplary use of the comparative method in literary criticism.

This third edition offers a corrected text of the second edition and is supplemented by an open-access website (in lieu of the second edition’s CD-ROM), providing all the recordings discussed by Lord, as well as a variety of other multimedia materials.