Odstíny a tóny - K modalitám románových obrazů 20. století v novější české próze – Hrtánek Petr (2022)

In recent Czech literature, a whole range of prose appears that shows how key historical events of the 20th century fatally intervened in individual human lives. In many works with such thematic focus, the plot is spread over a long period of time, so that in the background of the private 'small histories' of the heroes, almost panoramic, albeit incomplete and disjointed images of our recent past gradually emerge. This book selects precisely the prose of this type to illustrate, through eight analytical-interpretative studies, a phenomenon that has so far been considered and occasionally applied only marginally or sporadically in the Czech literary studies environment. This phenomenon is known as modality, which manifests itself in fiction not as a complex stylistic characteristic or genre category, but as a more or less fleeting 'shade', an unstable 'tone' of specific artistic expression. The individual chapters of this book thus show, among other things, that in selected novelistic images of the past century, it is not necessarily only tragic and apocalyptic moods that prevail, but that comedy, grotesqueness, and irony can also manifest themselves, that their realism can be undermined by fantastic moments, or that...