How We Understand the Beats: The Reception of the Beat Generation in the United States and the Czech Lands – Zita Antonín (2019)

How We Understand the Beatniks. Reception of the Beat Generation in the United States and in the Czech Republic. The book deals with the comparison of the reception of Beat Generation authors in the USA and in the Czech Republic, during two time periods – in the 1950s and 1960s and then from the 1990s to the present. While the publications of Beat Generation authors themselves remained unchanged, the contexts of these publications were fundamentally different: in the USA, the works of Beat Generation authors were often reduced by sensationalist critics to immature praise of drugs, sex, and violence, whereas in Czechoslovakia, these authors gained the favor of readers due to the unusualness of their literary language, which their prose and poetry represented in a literary market significantly distorted by the tenets of socialist realism. This study thus demonstrates how different contexts can influence readers' approaches to literary texts and their authors, ultimately helping to transform a given text into a different artistic work.