Chór a disonance - Česká literatura 1947-1963 – Papoušek Vladimír (2022)

The book Chorus and Dissonance. Czech Literature 1947-1963 is a loose continuation of the previous three-volume series History of the New ('New') Modernity and is part of a long-term project of the Center for Recent Czech Literature at the Faculty of Arts of the University of South Bohemia. In the first part of the book, the authors, who are literary and artistic historians and theorists from the philosophical faculties of the University of South Bohemia and Charles University, explore the cultural and ideological contexts of this complicated period when, after 1948, the communist regime in Czechoslovakia attempted to manipulate the entire society in the name of realizing a utopian project of the next social 'paradise.' In individual chapters, the authors try to describe and grasp these period transformations of official literature and culture. Attention is also paid to the often solitary cultural activities of individuals or small groups resisting, who sought free expression and autonomous creative gestures, despite the totalitarian effort to control them and close them off with an impenetrable border that separated the so-called socialist camp from the rest of the world. The second part then maps the morphological changes of individual literary genres during this period – lyric, epic, and drama, always with regard to their...