During the last decades Chinese scholars have been intensively collecting the oral transmissions of the cosmogonical Pangu 盤古 myth in order to clarify its role in Chinese culture. While the number of the orally transmitted versions of the myth is constantly increasing, the quotations from historical records used to substantiate the historical roots of this myth remain unchanged. In this paper I present an important and so far completely neglected source of the Pangu myth, preserved in a Tang dynasty Buddhist text, and compare it with the already extant versions of the Sanwu liji 三五曆紀, the Wuyun linianji 五運曆年 紀 and the Shuyiji 述異記. This version of the Pangu myth is unique in many respects: i its first part, it contains passages rather similar, though not identical with the versions in other sources, while in its second part, it offers a new set of homologic alloforms. This new source is presently the most complete version of the myth, and may contribute to clarifying both the provenance and the transmission of the Pangu myth.
The present study aims to analyse one of the most complex Ancient sources that enable us to study not only history and geography, but – as will be explained – also the ethnology of the life in ancient Greece and Rome, not only in the second century A.D., but in the older periods as well. The great quantity of folklore data is compartmentalized according to the types of literary folklore forms. This system is introduced by the researcher, as the Antiquity did not use such categorizations. The source contains a great number of tales and legends, fewer small folklore forms and also many topics known from later fairy tales. The concluding part of the article focuses on the importance of Pausanias’ work for the culture of the Antiquity in general and to the parallels with similar works produced in the Czech milieu in the nineteenth century.
The article focuses on the analysis of collections of fairy tales and legends of the Czech revivalist Božena Němcová, especially those in the Czech language. The specific clusters of tales are being analyzed one by one, as for the frequency of textual emendations made by B. Němcová. The most modified were the magical tales, less modified the anecdotic and humoristic ones, only slight changes were applied to animal, legendary and cumulative tales. All the changes correspond to the „mythological school“ of her time, but unlike Erben Němcová did not sought for the mythological origins of the texts, but rather aimed at expanding them and adapting them in accord with the conviction of the Czech National Movement on the crucial importance of the popular culture
The article deals with the typology of Baroque frontispieces in printed books published in Bohemian and Moravian printing houses in 1618-1765, which is viewed in terms of the function of the frontispieces in printing. The paper contains a detailed analysis of the main thematic variants of frontispieces. The thematic variants are analysed with respect to the content and genre of the work concerned with the aim to determine the main marketing strategies of Bohemian and Moravian printers, publishers or booksellers in the visual promotion of their products., Hana Beránková., Obsahuje anglický abstrakt a shrnutí., and Obsahuje bibliografii