Prague Palimpsest
eBook - PDF

Prague Palimpsest

Writing, Memory, and the City

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Prague Palimpsest

Writing, Memory, and the City

About this book

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 rewrittenā€”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-gardeā€”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, VĆ­t?zslav 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 Pragueā€”more than any other major European cityā€”has haunted the cultural and political imagination of the West.

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Yes, you can access Prague Palimpsest by Alfred Thomas in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Eastern European History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Contents
  2. Preface
  3. A Note on Translations, Quotations, and Names
  4. Introduction
  5. 1. Women on the Verge of History: LibuŔe and the Foundational Legend of Prague
  6. 2. Deviant Monsters and Wayward Women: The Prague Ghetto and the Legend of the Golem
  7. 3. The Castle Hill Was Hidden: Franz Kafka and Czech Literature
  8. 4. A Stranger in Prague: Writing and the Politics of Identity in Apollinaire, Nezval, and Camus
  9. 5. Sailing to Bohemia: Utopia, Memory, and the Holocaust in Postwar Austrian and German Writing
  10. Epilogue: Postmodern Prague?
  11. Appendix: Translations of Poems about Prague
  12. Bibliography
  13. Index