The Bohemian Body
Gender and Sexuality in Modern Czech Culture
Thomas, Alfred
Hardcover
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BOOK SUMMARY
    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 str
BOOK SYNOPSIS
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 Mácha, Bozena Nemcová, 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.
BOOK EXCERPTS
“At the heart of the tension between individualism and collectivism is the paradox of modernity itself. The rise of nationalism at the end of the eighteenth century witnessed the concomitant emergence of a discourse of human rights and a new emphasis on the dignity of man as an individual. Thus, at the precise moment when the earliest writers of the National Revival began to forge a political sense of their collective identity as Czechs, they were also confronting other constructions of identity such as socialism, feminism and, somewhat later, a proto-gay rights movement.”
BOOK REVIEWS
“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
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MORE BOOK INFO
ISBN: 0299222802
ISBN(13-digit): 9780299222802
Dewey Decimal: 891.8/65093538
Library of Congress: 2006031796
Book Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Pr
Language: ENG
No. of Pages: 271
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