The Bohemian Body
Gender and Sexuality in Modern Czech Culture
Format:Hardback
Publisher:University of Wisconsin Press
Published:30th Apr '07
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
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 such 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.
Thomas's book is remarkable for its scope and intellectual coherence. He notes that the oscillation between the parochial concerns of a small nation under threat of cultural extinction, and a cosmopolitan impulse that is no less powerful, is evident in Czech literary scholarship. The Bohemian Body's novel point of view is bound to stimulate discussion across the field of Czech literary criticism. - Maria Nemcova Banerjee, Smith College, author of Terminal Paradox: The Novels of Milan Kundera ""Through a series of careful readings of modern Czech-language literature and film, Thomas deploys gender analysis to reveal a consistent interplay within the texts between the personal and the political, as well as between local and European identities. Wary of strict categorizations, he celebrates complexity and plurality. Engagingly written and well-argued, The Bohemian Body will challenge historians and literary critics alike to rethink how we interpret Czech works of art."" - Chad Bryant, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
ISBN: 9780299222802
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 521g
304 pages