The Bohemian body : gender and sexuality in modern Czech culture / Alfred Thomas.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Thomas, Alfred, 1958-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Czech literature--19th century--History and criticism.

Czech literature.

Czech literature--20th century--History and criticism.

Gender identity in literature.

Sex role in literature.

Motion pictures--Czech Republic--History.

Motion pictures.

Culture in motion pictures.

History.

Czech Republic.

Physical Description:

xii, 271 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Madison : University of Wisconsin Press, [2007]

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 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.

Contents:

Maidens, barbarians, and vampires : nationality and sexuality in nineteenth-century Czech literature

Gender, form, and ethnicity in nineteenth-century Czech women's writing

Czech mates : homosexuality in Czech modernist short fiction, 1917-20

Between Paris and Moscow : sexuality and politics in interwar Czech poetry and film

Robots, golems, and femmes fatales : the drama of Karel Čapek

Terror and dream were my father and mother : postwar Czech fiction and film

"The unborn" : postwar feminist fiction and film.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 235-247) and index.

ISBN:

0299222802

9780299222802

OCLC:

71833303

Online:

Contributor biographical information

Publisher description