| SUMMARY: |
The present volume comes out as a result of an international seminar – Mircea Eliade between the History of Religions and the Fall into History – held on April 2, 2012, in Cluj-Napoca. It contains dr. Henry Pernet’s lecture given on that occasion and also three other articles signed by specialists in Eliade’s oeuvre and his political implication. The volume offers to its readers an important and valuable correspondence on the subject of Eliade, between Ioan Petru Culianu and Mac Linscott Ricketts, edited and introduced by Liviu Bordaș.
During the last few years, Mircea Eliade’s political past and the alleged influence of this past upon his scientific work has been considered the starting point for several controversies, which were analyzed by reputable scholars and also rejected. Although the suspicions and accusations brought to Eliade have been numerous, his life and work should not be interpreted (only) on the basis of his political options during a very limited period of his life, simple sympathies from his youth and without taking into account the historical context which generated these sympathies.
With this volume we offer four different perspectives on Mircea Eliade, the man and the scholar, caught between the history of religions and the fall into history. Many thanks to all participants to our international seminar, especially for constructive discussions, to each contributor, to the Department of Humanities of “George Barițiu” History Institute of Romanian Academy Cluj-Napoca for hosting the seminar and, nevertheless, to Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNCS – UEFISCDI, for supporting the seminar and this volume through project number PN-II-RU-PD-2011-3-0014: “The Intellectual Origins of anti-Semitism. Cultural Elements and Symbolic Representations in Interwar Romania”. |
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