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A wildly comic story about the fate of a Czech family from the 1960s onward.
More than any other art form, literature defined Eastern Europe as a cultural and political entity in the second half of the twentieth century. Although often persecuted by the state, East European writers formed what was frequently recognized to be a "second government," and their voices were heard and revered inside and outside the borders of their countries. This study by one of our most influential specialists on Eastern Europe considers the effects of the end of communism on such writers. According to Andrew Baruch Wachtel, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the creation of fledgling societies in Eastern Europe brought an end to the conditions that put the region's writers on a pedestal. I...
This is an appraisal od some of the best Czech fiction of the 20th century. After a brief introduction there are chapters on Hasek, Hrabal, Skorecky, Pavel, Klima and a final chapter on Hodrova, Viewegh and Topol.
The complex diachronic and synchronic status of the concepts "be" and "have" can be understood only with consideration of their full range of constructions and functions. Data from modern Slavic languages (Russian, Czech, Polish, Bulgarian) provides a window into zero copulas, non-verbal "have" expressions, and verbal constructions. From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, "be" and "have" are analyzed in terms of a blended prototype model, wherein existence/copula for "be" and possession/relationship for "have" are inseparably combined. These concepts are related to each other in their functions and meanings and serve as organizing principles in a conceptual network of semantic neighbors, including "give, take, get, become, make," and verbs of position and motion. Renewal and replacement of "be" and "have" occur through processes of polysemization and suppletization involving lexical items in this network. Topics include polysemy, suppletion, tense/mood auxiliaries, modality, causatives, evidentiality, function words, contact phenomena, syntactic calques, and idiomatic constructions.
An history that presents a canvas of post-war Czech literary developments within the cultural and political context of the times. It provides information about the many English-language translations from Czech literature, and the circumstances in which these translations came about.
Picaresque romp around today's Prague. Communism is over, and the heedless rich play on.
The turbulent events of World War II and the subsequent communist regime in Czechoslovakia restricted Czech writers' freedom of expression. As Czech literature was developing in two different locations and conditions, writers on both sides created diverse works. This book aims to complete the picture of life during that period.
Continuing the work undertaken in Vol. 1 of the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, Vol. 2 considers various topographic sites--multicultural cities, border areas, cross-cultural corridors, multiethnic regions--that cut across national boundaries, rendering them permeable to the flow of hybrid cultural messages. By focusing on the literary cultures of specific geographical locations, this volume intends to put into practice a new type of comparative study. Traditional comparative literary studies establish transnational comparisons and contrasts, but thereby reconfirm, howev.
This book considers Russian, Czech and Slovak fiction in the late communist and early post-communist periods. It focuses on the most innovative trend to emerge in this period, on those writers who, during and after the collapse of communism, characterised themselves as 'liberators' of literature. It shows how these writers in their fiction and critical work reacted against the politicisation of literature by Marxist-Leninist and dissident ideologues, rejecting the conventional perception of literature as moral teacher, and redefining the nature and purpose of writing. The book demonstrates how this quest, enacted in the works of these writers, served for many critics and readers as a metaphor for the wider disorientation and crisis precipitated by the collapse of communism.
Provides librarians and library managers with information on how to start and maintain a fiction collection, offering guidelines, procedures, and interviews with professionals. Tells how to select materials, how to build a collection using suggestions from patrons, how to use book reviews as criteria for selection, and how to make use of WLN conspectus software to decide what selections are most marketable. Also lists sources, such as specific databases, for collecting specific genres. For librarians at public and academic libraries.