Eliška D. Härtelová, Josef Hrdlička (eds.)

The book is a collection of studies that have two aims: to enrich the view of Czech poetry from 1945 to the present, and to contribute to the question of what Comparative Literature is as a discipline. The studies are based on a comparison of a Czech author or authors with a selected foreign author, but they seek to avoid the binary comparison of two national literatures. They are aware that the notions of “nation”, “national literature” and “influence” have been gradually eroded in Comparative Literature. According to many scholars, “national” does not make sense without “non-national”, since to define what is characteristic of a given culture requires confronting what is foreign to it. These studies seek to create this alien prism to contribute to a fuller understanding of the changes in and development of Czech poetry after 1945, and in so doing, aim to indicate broader developmental tendencies and currents in poetry after the second half of the twentieth century.