Počátky české literární kritiky v době osvícenské
Origins of Czech literary criticism during the Enlightenment

Bases — model — perspektives

Summary/Abstract: This study deals with Enlightenment literary criticism in the Czech lands within the broad context of Central European literatures and criticism at that time. The authors previous conceptions of literary criticism and present a relational model of literary criticism, which considers criticism as a form of negotiation between critics, authors and the public, i.e. within the coordinates of aesthetics, the canon and the public. At any particular time their relationship always creates the current form of the critical field in which it is legitimate (or not) to make critical judgements about literature. As opposed to the older scholarly discipline, the more recent Enlightenment criticism bases its authority on the indefinite nature of its judgements, the processual and periodical nature of its communications and thus on the newly established scholarly, social and literary journals and reviews. The second part of the study focuses on the studie 33 development of journals and their characteristic critical debates in the 1770s–1790s, as well as the ongoing development of literary criticism written in Czech at the turn of the 18th and the 19th centuries. The conclusion of the text focuses on and analyses criticism through the eyes of the epoch. It also shows how criticism gradually established itself as a form of communication that helped to create the key literary institutions in spite of the ongoing reservations of writers and the public

• Details
• Contents