Out of the nineteen articles received from the contributors and positively assessed by an international assessors' team to be published in this volume, four are concerned with the growth of the Sanskrit epic literature (A. Hiltebeitel, O. Hellwig, M. Jezic, H. Brinkhaus), the first deals with the both Sanskrit epics, the next two with the Ramayana, and the last one with the transition from the epic to Puranic cosmogony; six papers explore some aspects of the social and economic context of the epics, especially the Mahabharata (J. Bronkhorst, G. Bailey, Y. Vassilkov, T. Pontillo, P. Szczurek, D. Feller); three papers are concerned with the composition and narrative strategies in the Puranas (R. Sohnen-Thieme, M. Taylor, K. Valpey); four are dedicated to the relationship between the Sanskrit epics and kavya (P. Olivelle, K. Gonc Moacanin, L. Sudyka, A. Bonisoli); and two articles are philological studies of the meaning of particular words in epic contexts (S. Sellmer, L. Kulikov).