We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
In 2020, a book of early proses by Richard Weiner was published under the title Přetržená nit a jiné rané prózy. In response to this publication we made an interpretation of selected texts focused on Weiner’s typical topics and motives. Our goals were to find specifics about this Weiner’s creative phase and try to make a reflection about question “How important are these early texts for author‘ s literary work as a whole.“
More...
Victorious Fall (1929) is the first novel by the Czech-born Slovak author Petr Jilemnický (1901–1949). The novel reflects the motives of "misery" and "beauty" of Kysuce. Literary historiography perceives novel in regard to Expressionism (J. Števček, 1983) and Lyricism (F. Miko, 1969; J. Števček, 1973). The paper points to the distinct metaphorical, imaginative nature and semantic ambiguity of the novel. Despite the criticisms of the DAV group, Peter Jilemnický was a member of the group, Victorious Fall features many stylistic and expressive principles related to the aesthetics of the Czech avantgarde program Poetism. The novel represents a contact between literary tradition and innovative stylistic techniques. The use of lyrical tendencies demonstrates the adoption of the poetic quality of Slovak literature in a response to the crisis of the prose in the first half of the 20. century. Victorious Fall proves the artistic pursuit of Peter Jilemnický for a new novel form.
More...
Václav Havel claims in his essays how important the structure of his play is. In this paper we will focus on the rhythm of Václav Havel's dramas as a crucial component of their structure and will analyze his plays, The Increased Difficulty of Concentration (1968) and Largo desolato (1984).
More...
Contemporary Czech writer Václav Vokolek is in his work inspired mostly by the world of literature, paintings and spiritual concepts, distancing his writing from any political and social reality. But he made one exception at the beginning of new millennium, in cooperation with Czech illustrator Jindřich Strašnov. Together they have created Nejsme jako my (2001), cycle of political satires with expressive illustrations, pointed against main characters of Czech post-revolutionary political scene. The aim of this contribution is to highlight this artistically-literary work, that sure has potential to speak to readers but has not got any responses or reviews ever since publishing.
More...
The topic of this study is the character of the false messiah – various aspects associated with the character are analysed in three contemporary Czech novels which to varying extent touch on the subgenre area of dystopia: Mondschein (2012) by Ondřej Štindl, Můj bratr Mesiáš (2017) by Martin Vopěnka, and Logoz aneb Robert Holm, marketér dánský (2019) by David Zábranský. The study focuses on literary (genre, narrative, motivic) and social (religious, spiritual, political, environmental) aspects of the (pseudo)messiah theme that are common to these novels. The analysis is based on the typology of the literary character in Daniela Hodrová’s work.
More...
The paper examines the relevant genological categories of factually based imaginative literature, considers various methods of its classification and proposes the notion of modular genology. The theoretical conclusions are applied to the case of Lukáš Onderčanin's book Utopia in Lenin's Garden.
More...
The study is focused on the novel by Daniela Kapitáňová: Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book. The goal is to analyze the moments found in the book: first, the cemetery motif, dark humour and danse macabre, then specifics of the region and its society and last the mystified narrator playing with authenticity.
More...
On the international literary scene Samuel Beckett has, to a considerable degree, established himself as a connoisseur of nothingness. Although this fact manifests itself primarily through his dramas, even a cursory glance at Beckett’s prosaic works would allow the reader to uncover mentioned problem in an unapologetically explicit context. This work is devoted to the outlining of the essence of nothingness in Samuel Beckett’s collection Texts for Nothing. Based on the series of thirteen texts, it analyzes the core of the named concept not only from the semantical and contextual viewpoints, but also linguistically. The language is being put under scrutiny both in terms of the narrator’s language competence and, generally, as a phenomenon and namely as the contour for delineatingthe essence of the notion as abstract as “nothing” – if not innately given, then obtained in the process of interpretation. The analysis also takes into the account such problematic aspects as the assumed, inherently impossible expression of nothingness and the failure of verbalization brought about by such a process.
More...
The present paper analyses the portrayal of the working class in two texts: A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux and Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon. Both texts draw heavily on the thought of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and the study thus uses concepts introduced by Bourdieu to interpret the selected works. Through their personal journey, the narrators attempt to restate the image of the social class from which they originate. The description of the working class is not reduced to economic differences as sociocultural differences are emphasized. The themes raised by the texts extend well beyond the literary field: the description of the marginalized subject is deemed a political act.
More...
Sebastiano Erizzo's Six Days follows Decameron's model of fitting stories into a narrative framework that gives rise to storytelling, but differs from it by an all-male company of storytellers. The author calls his stories “examples”, emphasizing the lessons that the reader can learn from them for himself, and the fun and enjoyment of storytelling set aside. There is no laughter, no joy, and the characters and storytellers are similar in their reasoning aimed at encouraging virtue and integrity.
More...
The diary of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (first published in 1961), reveals the poetess’s polemical treatment of Self as duty to Other. Spread over less than a year of actual time, the content of the narrative is overwhelming. Diary by E. B. B. is an undisguised autobiographical articulation of the writer’s sense of her physical weakness, her doubts about her own sanity, her worship of God, her fear of redundancy, her disturbing interest in reading, and her fixation on death. This thematic range provides a foundation for a hermeneutic (and varied by feminism) examination of identity as incompletion. A kind of incompletion partially fulfilled through diary narrative as dialogue.
More...
The paper discusses Henry Mayhew’s novel 1851: Or, the Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys and Family, Who Came Up to London to ‘Enjoy Themselves,’ and to See the Great Exhibition. The novel, itself written in 1851, offers a valuable commentary on one of the most significant events in Victorian economic and social history. In particular, the paper explores the novel’s ambivalent attitudes to production and consumption and to the producing and the consuming classes, as well as the way these attitudes are created or sustained at the level of narrative structure.
More...
This paper is an introduction to the importance of the legal system in Dickens’ writing. Dickens’ early beginnings as a clerk at a law office and as a journalist reporting on civil law cases are very much intertwined with the everyday life in the courts of Victorian England. This makes it no surprise that the legal system is present in almost any novel by Dickens. In this paper I aim to establish a connection between the legal system and Dickens’ character and world-building. This will be done based on Dickens’ first novel The Pickwick Papers.
More...
After the publication of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein in 1818, the story took on a life of its own. People started comparing every-day occurrences in their lives to the fictional character. Initially it was about monsters and creators of monsters, and then other interpretations crept in: artistry, creativity, and scientific progress among others. This paper provides an overview of the development of the Frankenstein simile and metaphor in post-Romantic nineteenth-century Britain and treats the range of meanings as intralingual translations of the original story.
More...
Jacqueline Woodson‘s latest novel, Red at the Bone, unveils pressing issues concerning the contemporary African American experience. Through sixteen-year-old Melody’s coming-of-age party, the author meditates on themes such as teenage pregnancy, sexuality, queerness, urban life, familial relations, class division, history, and education. Woodson’s mastery in constructing the narrative situates the story at the border of prose and poetry; thus, the immediacy of the problems transgresses the limitation of genre. The current paper shall attempt to investigate the various manifestations of love that affect the characters’ personal growth, their agency and motivations in the new century.
More...
In The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen introduces the reader to the Lamberts: a dysfunctional family of highly individualistic characters whose goals and ideas never intersect. Throughout the course of the novel, the elderly parents and their three grown-up children further degrade their relationships – both within the family and even with reality. They are utterly, self-consciously alone and incapable of creating a stable connection to one another or with anybody else. In the current paper, I shall try to explain their inability to connect to others by using their intrinsic loneliness as a starting point and the manner in which it helps in forming their identity.
More...
The text aims to reveal some of the weaknesses of perceiving one’s own face compared to that of a foreigner in the prose-fiction works of Maupassant. For this purpose we analyze novels and stories dedicated to Algeria and the Arabs, with an especial emphasis Allouma as well as on the otherness of female character. Exploring a foreigner’s characteristics, we encounter initial duality in the description which affords approaching closer the foreigner’s, and moving away from one’s own, image. In addition, an impression of compassion to a foreigner’s problems arises while critique of one’s own emerges.
More...
This paper analyzes the narration specificities of the novel Benares by the Mauritian writer Barlen Pyamootoo, as well as the narration itself – description ratio and its impact on the narrative rhythm. We try to determine the role description plays for the economy of narration in the text, where its place is important, and we also analyze the extent to which description integrates the narrative. We consider that the dynamic of narration is subdued, giving place to monotony, and this, in our view, is a sought reception effect.
More...
Up until 1944 Arthur Schnitzler was the most widely read author of the Young Vienna group in Bulgaria. The model of reception of his work shows how in the field of the free book market there can function categories that we tend to define more often as negative (publishing series, cheap publications, mass publications, social crises, etc.) yet such as would impose the significance of a particular writer’s oeuvre . The balance gets secured by the knowledgeable intelligentsia which, in critical discussions, only guides the process.
More...
The starting point of the article is the question about the possibility of treating Adam Mickiewicz’s Widowisko as a popular drama. The author analyzes the work in terms of the genre’s rules, then wonders whether its shape was influenced by Mickie- wicz’s theatrical experiences or his reading. She then argues that Widowisko, more than theatre, was inspired by Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Faust and Jan Śniadecki’s disserta- tion O pismach klasycznych i romantycznych (On classical and romantic writings), and that the work goes beyond the boundaries of both the drama genre and the Faustian convention.
More...
