A01=Alfred Thomas
albert camus
amnesia
Author_Alfred Thomas
authors
avant-garde
beauty
bohumil hrabal
Category=DSB
Category=NHD
chronicle
class
cosmopolitan
czech republic
deviance
effacement
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
europe
forgetting
gender
golem
guillaume apollinaire
gustav meyrink
holocaust
identity
ingeborg bachmann
inscription
jan neruda
jewish ghettos
judaism
kafka
legends
libuse
literature
medieval
memory
milan kundera
modernism
nonfiction
paul celan
poetry
prague
rainer maria rilke
renaissance
social change
totalitarian
urban
vitezslav nezval
wg sebald
women
writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780226795409
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 01 Oct 2010
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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A city of immense literary mystique, Prague has inspired writers across the centuries with its beauty, cosmopolitanism, and tragic history. Envisioning the ancient city in central Europe as a multilayered text, or palimpsest, that has been constantly revised and rewritten - from the medieval and Renaissance chroniclers who legitimized the city's foundational origins to the modernists of the early twentieth century who established its reputation as the new capital of the avant-garde - Alfred Thomas argues that Prague has become a paradoxical site of inscription and effacement, of memory and forgetting, a utopian link to the prewar and pre-Holocaust European past and a dystopia of totalitarian amnesia. Considering a wide range of writers, including the city's most famous son, Franz Kafka, Prague Palimpsest reassesses the work of poets and novelists such as Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, Gustav Meyrink, Jan Neruda, Vitezslav Nezval, and Rainer Maria Rilke and engages with other famous authors who 'wrote' Prague, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Ingeborg Bachmann, Albert Camus, Paul Celan, and W. G. Sebald.
The result is a comparative, interdisciplinary study that helps to explain why Prague - more than any other major European city - has haunted the cultural and political imagination of the West.
Alfred Thomas is professor of English and Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of five books, including, most recently, The Bohemian Body: Gender and Sexuality in Modern Czech Culture.
