Prague Palimpsest: Writing, Memory, and the City - Hardcover

Thomas, Alfred

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226795403 ISBN 13: 9780226795409

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226795403
• ISBN 13: 9780226795409
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 200
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar