Faith, truth, fidelity : : věrnost in post-Munich Czech poetry / / Frances Jackson.

• Superior document: Schnittstellen
• VerfasserIn: Jackson, Frances,
• Place / Publishing House: Göttingen : : V&R Unipress,, [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Schnittstellen
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (311 pages)

Though frequently acknowledged as a remarkable phase within Czech literary history, the poetic outpouring in the build-up to and aftermath of the Munich Agreement has received comparatively little rigorous scholarly attention to date. In this study, Frances Jackson seeks redress to the balance, drawing on a range of theoretical instruments, including the idea of the event in both a narratological and more philosophical sense, and notions of rhetoric and authenticity. She establishes vernost ("faith(fulness)", "loyalty", "verity", "troth" etc.) as the distinguishing feature of collections such as Seifert's Zhasnete svetla or Halas' Torzo nadeje and demonstrates how this can be constructed poetically. Rather than viewing the period as a watershed moment per se, the study also situates its output within the context of late modernism, highlighting important parallels with contemporaneous English-language works.

Table of Contents

Intro -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Table of Contents -- Body -- Introduction -- Narrative Beginnings -- Historical Background -- Why Poetry? -- Keeping the Faith -- The Poets -- The Poetry -- Room for Improvement -- 1. Poetic Events and Eventfulness -- The Event as an Analytical Category -- Incomplete and Outside Events -- Pomp and Circumstance -- (Do Not) Expect the Unexpected -- Badiou's Category of the Event -- Poems as Events in Their Own Right -- 2. Figural Show and Tell -- Homeward Bound -- Theories of the Allegoric Mode -- Allegory, Allegoresis or Something More? -- The Stuff of Nightmares -- Swarms of Swabians -- Metaphorically Speaking -- When Disaster Strikes -- Fictio Personae -- Let Them Speak or Forever Hold Their Peace -- Personifying Prague -- 3. Shaping a Poetic Past and Future Present -- Differing Approaches to Memory -- Language Issues -- Memory Studies and Literature -- The Speaker Recalls -- Looking Forward to Looking Back -- Poetic Monuments to the Past and Present -- Repurposing the Past -- Places of Memory -- (Grand-)Mother of the Nation -- Formal Differences -- Seifert's Maternal Vision -- Halas' Němcová: All Things to All Men -- 4. Rhetorical Authenticity -- The Art of Rhetoric -- The Rhetorical Situation -- An Air of the Authentic -- Paradox and Artificiality -- Fluctuating Forms of Authenticity -- Authenticity of Expression, Experience and Execution -- Věrnost: When Rhetoric Met Authenticity -- The Speaker as One Who Remembers -- The Speaker as One Who Mourns -- The Speaker as One Who Speaks On Behalf of Others -- The Speaker as One Who Tells the Truth -- History in the Making -- Competing Truths -- 5. A Break with the Past? -- Where to Draw the Line? -- History Relived and Rewritten -- Cracks, Fissures and Shifting Planes -- A Feast For All of the Senses -- Longing For What is No More (But Might Be Again).

6. Late Modernism - Not an End but an Alternative -- W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice -- Birds and Books of a Feather? -- Auden's Another Time -- MacNeice's Autumn Journal -- War on the Wireless -- The Case of the Missing Věrnost -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Archival sources -- Primary sources -- Secondary sources -- Acknowledgements -- Index.