Home and the World in Slovak Writing

A Small Nation’s Literature in Context

Katarina Gephardt, Charles Sabatos, Ivana Taranenková

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780228024071
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Literatures of small nations represent a minuscule portion of the global literary marketplace, where books written in English outnumber translated works. The struggle for visibility in relation to dominant languages and cultures is not new in Slovakia, a nation of five million whose literary history has been shaped by the influence of more widely spoken languages including Hungarian, Czech, and Russian.

Home and the World in Slovak Writing brings Slovak literature out of this isolation to tell the story of how a nation's literature can survive and thrive despite a small domestic audience and relatively limited circulation in English translation. The book demonstrates how historic events such as the post-Stalin Thaw, the Prague Spring, and the Velvet Revolution moulded the Slovak canon and situates contemporary Slovak literature in broader regional and global contexts. Through case studies of the transformations and adaptations of Slovak literature, contributors examine the changing social roles of writers, the tensions between tradition and innovation, and the dynamic interactions between influences from the outside world and domestic sources of inspiration.

Home and the World in Slovak Writing maps the relationship between geopolitical destiny and literary production at a critical moment. As relations between the East and the West are destabilized by war, the question of cultural identity has again become a matter of national survival in Central Europe.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Foreword: Slovak Literature and Central Europe
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Slovak Literature and the Post-Stalin Liberalization, 1956–70
• 2 Literature of the Transition: Between Neo-modernism and Postmodernism
• 3 Writing the Self from Autobiography to Autofiction
• 4 History and Memory: Rewriting the Past
• 5 Poetry and Social Engagement
• 6 Subversion and Experimentation in Contemporary Poetry
• 7 Regional Writing and National Identity in the Borderlands
• 8 Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Writing
• 9 Women’s Writing and Social Change
• Coda | Translators and Translations
• Appendix | Selected Bibliography of Slovak Literature in English Translation
• Contributors
• Index