Hledání národní literatury – Otruba Mojmír (2013)

The anthology Searching for National Literature presents the literary-scientific work of Mojmír Otruba (1923 – 2003). Otruba is primarily known as an outstanding expert on Czech literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, whose knowledge he utilized in numerous postfaces and studies that extend into the field of philology in general and literary theory, as well as an editor of literature mainly from the 19th century, and as a leading literary lexicographer. This rich work, both in scope and approach, scattered across often hard-to-access journals, anthologies, or editions of Czech classics, is relatively unclear for potential interested parties, preventing the researcher’s contributions from being properly appreciated (similarly, Otruba's original studies on current issues of intertextuality, Signs and Values, 1994, represent only a fraction of his work and research efforts). The presented anthology responds not only to this situation but primarily to the relevance of M. Otruba's work, the author of numerous studies on national mythologies in the 19th and 20th centuries and their literary anchoring (the titular study Searching for the Nation) and on the specifics of Czech literature. It aims to present Otruba with an emphasis on: his studies on mythologies associated with the 19th century and its literature; studies on literary development in the 19th century, especially Czech...