The fruitful cooperation of the Institutes of Literary Studies of the Bulgarian and Hungarian Academies of Sciences dates back to 1981. Initially it was a contact between the departments for literary theories of two socialist academies; later it comprehended whole institutes in countries that both became members of the European Union. The context has changed immensely, but the intense intellectual climate of the encounters of groups of Bulgarian and Hungarian literary scholars did not. Workshops, conferences, academic visits, and joint publications characterise the cooperation, which resulted in the foundation of a book series in English called Images of the Other in Literary Communication. The first volume was published in 2006, and it has taken six years to prepare this second one. What we are offering here is not an usual volume of conference proceedings, but rather a selection of papers representing the achievement of two research institutes of literature and their cooperation.
Peter Hajdu
