Canis lupus: between the ritual mask and literary animal

The collection ‘Canis lupus: between a ritual mask and a literary animal’ is the first in a series of publications that publish the results of the ‘Oral, ritual, literary’ project, whose leader for the first project phase is the Faculty of Philology and Arts of the University of Kragujevac. The project itself is financially supported by the Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia and should be understood as a contribution of the university to the establishment of a humane pattern of belonging to cultural heritage, that is, as a contribution to the development of social responsibility of students and teachers. This, in this particular case, refers to scientific and professional support for the implementation of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (UNESCO, 2003). (…)

It is planned to examine folklore chronotopes, archetypes and collective representations in the traditional culture of Serbs as part of a multi-year project that includes both education and scientific research work. Our intention is to offer literature students research programs based on concepts such as wolf, victim, masks, etc. in the creative and innovative environment of philological doctoral studies. This choice is conditioned by their semantic potential, which is released in the connection of the mythological, folklore-ritual and literary, devoid of conditioning in terms of distinctions between oral and written, national and world, classical and trivial literature, between antiquity, the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque, Romanticism, etc., and the contemporary literary and cultural micro and macrocosm, as well as different literary genres and types. (…)

— From the editor’s foreword