Narativní způsoby v české próze 19. století

Alice Jedličková a kol.

This collective monograph presents the first systematic inquiry into the features of Czech 19th century narrative in a survey encompassing a wide generic span of fiction in the course of several decades. The methodology, diachronic poetics of narrative, meets one of the crucial demands of recent narratology: to respect the historicity of narrative, and to interpret it in the context of cultural norms and communicational practices of the period in question. Thus, the analytic tools employed here are derived from such qualities of historical narratives that the authors were able to identify as substantial ones. As a result, it proved helpful to detect discursive strategies establishing narrative authority instead of applying a typology of narrators as usual. Rather than focusing on transitions between narrator and character speech it proved useful to follow the distribution of speech and narrative information. It also proved more efficient to identify cultural norms as parameters informing the logic of description rather than discerning static descriptions from dynamic ones. The analyses inhere both works of representatives of the whole period such as Božena Němcová or Alois Jirásek, and works of writers that provided a stable background of narrative production popular with the audiences, such as František Pravda or Prokop Chocholoušek. A system of references between the individual chapters makes it possible to display the same works from various perspectives, and to illuminate both positive and counterproductive interaction of narrative modes.