Shaped by literature

Literature written in Czech and German from the Czech lands has so far been told in separate stories, which were intended to justify the distinctiveness of national literatures. This book, on the contrary, for the first time looks at the development of literature in the Czech lands as a whole. It traces, across literature written in Czech and German, the ways in which literary works depicted and shaped the perceptions, actions, and feelings of people in the long 19th century, i. e. the various forms of their subjectivity. It tells the story of the rise, nationalization, and crisis of a person' s self-image, associated since the Enlightenment with the belief in the ability to cultivate and harmonize one' s inner self. In addition to famous personalities, such as Karel Hynek Mácha, Josef Kajetán Tyl, Božena Němcová, Adalbert Stifter, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach or Franz Kafka, hundreds of lesser-known and forgotten authors also meet here, who innovated literary means of expression and together shaped the modern image of man. – Published in collaboration with Institute of Czech Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, v. in. i.