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Synopsis

A path to understanding modern Czech literature

The Bohemian Body examines the modernist forces within nineteenth and twentieth century Europe that helped shape both Czech nationalism and artistic interaction among ethnic and social groups – Czechs and Germans, men and women, gays and straights.

By re-examining the work of key Czech male and female writers and poets from the National Revival to the Velvet Revolution, Alfred Thomas exposes the tendency of Czech literary criticism to separate the political and the personal in modern Czech culture. He points instead to the complex interplay of the political and the personal across ethnic, cultural and intellectual lines and within the works of suck individual writers as Karel Hynek Macha, Bozena Nemcova, and Rainer Maria Rilke, resulting in the emergence and evolution of a protean modern identity. The product is a seemingly paradoxical yet nuanced understanding of Czech culture (including literature, opera, and film), long overlooked or misunderstood by Western scholars.