The latest issue of "Letonica" #53 is now available

Agita Lūse (Riga Stradiņš University) in her article "Perspectives on Ethnography in Latvia of the 1930s and 1940s. The Case of Ziedonis Ligers" examines the emergence of ethnography as an academic discipline in Latvia and the fate of ethnologist Ziedonis Ligers (1917-2001), illustrating the processes that shaped the understanding of the discipline in the inter-war period. Ginta Pērle-Sīle (University of Latvia; ILFA) in her article "Material Selection Principles for the Folk Song Collections collected by Baltic-Germans and Published in the First Half of the 19th Century" focuses on the first collections of Latvian folk songs collected and published by the German-Baltics, and by comparing these collections with the "Latvju dainas" (Latvian Songs), the author reflects on the possible belonging of the included folk songs to Latvian traditions and festivals and provides insights into the strategies and circumstances of the collection's creation.

Ilze Jansone (University of Latvia) in her article "Towards Syncretic Spirituality: Dimensions of Religion in the Novel When "Water Shimmers" by Nora Ikstena" uses hermeneutic methods to analyse the latest Latvian prose work, focusing on the author's use of "imaginative apologetics". Laura Laurušaitė (Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore) in her article "The Role of Food in Creating Identity: Examples of Contemporary Latvian and Lithuanian Literature" focuses on the choice of food and culinary practices in literary works, suggesting that food can be used to explore the period of occupation that most influenced 20th century Lithuanian and Latvian identities, and perestroika as an attempt to get rid of a foreign power. Ausma Cimdiņa (University of Latvia) in her article "Apocalypse of Soviet War Novel in Latvian Literature: "In the Glow of War" by Visvaldis Lāms" explores the war novel through the well-known work by V. Lāms, in which the author represents the image of a legionary and portrays the Second World War from the perspective of the Latvian people and the Latvian legionary.

The issue also includes three articles in English. Elīna Veira's (RTU Liepāja Academy) article "A Frame work for Studying the Perception of Print-based Poems and Their Trans-medial Adaptations" aims to develop a mechanism to study the perception of poetry and its trans-medial adaptations and to test the model in practice. Sergejs Kruks (Riga Stradiņš University) in his article "Ambiguous Grammar of Legal Discourse" has carried out a quantitative analysis of the corpus of Latvian laws (1990-2022), using the method of factor analysis and showing an increase in the use of ambiguous grammatical forms. Iryna Pupurs (T. Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; former visiting researcher at the ILFA) in her article "Latvian Literature in Ukraine: a Brief Overview of its Perception and Interpretation During the Last Hundred Years" examines Latvian-Ukrainian literary relations, the history of their translations and encyclopaedic information about Latvian writers and their works published in Ukraine.

In the latest literature review you can read Vitas Zelče's (University of Latvia) review "175 000+ Latvian biography" about Andrejs Plakans' monograph "The Reluctant Exiles. Latvians in the West after World War II" (Brill, Ferdinand Schöningh, 2021).

Literary editors: Evelīna Zilgalve and Dace Strelēvica-Ošiņa.

Design: Tatjana Raičiņeca.

The journal is open access: https://lulfmi.lv/en/Letonica-Nr-53