Tvořeni literaturou. Společné dějiny česky a německy psané literatury českých zemí (1760–1920)

Václav Smyčka, Václav Petrbok, Jan Budňák, Ladislav Futtera, Martin Hrdina, Mirek Němec, Matouš Turek, Václav Smyčka (ed.), Václav Petrbok (ed.)

Czech and German literature from the Czech lands has been told in separate stories, which were supposed to justify the uniqueness of the national literatures.

This book, on the other hand, looks for the first time at the development of literature in the Czech lands as a whole. It traces, across Czech and German literature, the ways in which literary works represented and shaped the perceptions, actions and feelings of people in the long 19th century, i.e. the various forms of their subjectivity. In doing so, it tells of the rise, nationalisation and crisis of the self-image of man and woman, associated since the Enlightenment with the belief in the ability to cultivate and harmonise his inner self. Alongside well-known personalities such as Karel Hynek Mácha, Josef Kajetán Tyl, Adalbert Stifter and Franz Kafka, hundreds of now lesser-known and forgotten authors who innovated literary means of expression and together shaped the modern image of subject. Theoretically, the book draws particularly on Michel Foucault’s conception of the subject, Andreas Reckwitz’s hybrid subjectivity, and Panagiotis Kondylis’s theory of modernity.