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Written in the early 1890s, before Czech independence and in an age of patriotic upsurge and romanticism, these thirty-four tales quite naturally reflect a glorification of the Czech past. While the details of the legends are necessarily archaic, peopled by kings and noblemen, ghosts and magic, the themes are universal. Now at the dawn of a new era of Czech independence, they provide a fascinating new perspective to the contemporary situation.
A collection of old Czech stories and legends.
The Art of Czech Animation is the first comprehensive English language account of Czech animation from the 1920s to the present, covering both 2D animation forms and CGI, with a focus upon the stop-motion films of Jirí Trnka, Hermína Týrlová, Jan Švankmajer and Jirí Barta. Stop-motion is a highly embodied form of animation and The Art of Czech Animation develops a new materialist approach to studying these films. Instead of imposing top-down Film Theory onto its case studies, the book's analysis is built up from close readings of the films themselves, with particular attention given to their non-human objects. In a time of environmental crisis, the unique way Czech animated films use allegory to de-centre the human world and give a voice to non-human aspects of the natural world points us towards a means by which culture can increase ecological awareness in viewers. Such a refutation of a human-centred view of the world was contrary to communist orthodoxy and it remains so under late-stage consumer-capitalism. As such, these films do not only offer beautiful examples of allegory, but stand as models of political dissent. The Art of Czech Animation is a unique endeavour of film philosophy to provide a materialist appraisal of a heretofore neglected strand of Central-Eastern European cinema.
Emphasizing the importance of popular culture and the wealth of knowledge that can be gained through an analysis of the daily lives and practices of individuals, this book serves as an introduction to Czech popular culture. It includes 600 entries, cross-referenced to allow readers to pursue particular topics in greater depth.
Frances Starn is a writer living in Berkeley, California. --Book Jacket.
29 tales of legends associated with several well-known sites of old Prague
A selection of the best in travel writing, with both fiction and non-fiction presented together, this companion is for all those who like travelling, like to think about travelling, and who take an interest in their destination. It covers guidebooks as well as books about food, history, art and architecture, religion, outdoor activities, illustrated books, autobiographies, biographies and fiction and lists books both in and out of print. Anderson's Travel Companion is arranged first by continent, then alphabetically by country and then by subject, cross-referenced where necessary. There is a separate section for guidebooks and comprehensive indexes. Sarah Anderson founded the Travel Bookshop in 1979 and is also a journalist and writer on travel subjects. She is known by well-known travel writers such as Michael Palin and Colin Thubron. Michael Palin chose her bookshop as his favourite shop and Colin Thubron and Geoffrey Moorhouse, among others, made suggestions for titles to include in the Travel Companion.
The Bohemian Body examines the modernist forces within nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe that helped shape both Czech nationalism and artistic interaction among ethnic and social groups—Czechs and Germans, men and women, gays and straights. By re-examining the work of key Czech male and female writers and poets from the National Revival to the Velvet Revolution, Alfred Thomas exposes the tendency of Czech literary criticism to separate the political and the personal in modern Czech culture. He points instead to the complex interplay of the political and the personal across ethnic, cultural, and intellectual lines and within the works of such individual writers as Karel Hynek Mácha, Bozena Nemcová, and Rainer Maria Rilke, resulting in the emergence and evolution of a protean modern identity. The product is a seemingly paradoxical yet nuanced understanding of Czech culture (including literature, opera, and film), long overlooked or misunderstood by Western scholars.
Since its foundation in the ninth century Prague has punched way above its weight to become a fulcrum of European culture. The city’s most illustrious figures in the fields of music, literature and film are well known: Mozart staged the premiere of his opera Don Giovanni here; in the early twentieth century Franz Kafka was at the forefront of the city’s intellectual life, while later writers such as Milan Kundera and film directors such as Milos Forman chronicled Prague’s fortunes under communism. Yet the city has a cultural heritage that runs far deeper than Kafka museums and Mozart-by-candlelight concerts. It encompasses the avant-garde punk group Plastic People of the Universe, the “new wave” film directors of the 1960s who made their striking movies in the city’s famed Barrandov studios, and artists such as Alfons Mucha and Frantisek Kupka whose revolutionary canvases fomented Art Nouveau and abstract art at the dawn of the twentieth century. Beyond art galleries, concert halls and cinemas the history of Prague has been one of invasion and sometimes brutal oppression. The great German chancellor Otto von Bismarck once commented that “whoever controls Prague, controls mid-Europe” and a succession of imperialist powers have taken this advice to heart, most recently Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Opposition has taken many forms, from the religious reformer Jan Hus in the fifteenth century to playwright and dissident Václav Havel, whose elevation to the Czechoslovak presidency in 1990 made him a symbol of the rebirth of democracy in Eastern Europe. In this book Andrew Beattie also reflects on the modern city, where bold new buildings such as Frank Gehry’s “Dancing House” rub shoulders with monuments from the Gothic and Baroque eras such as the Charles Bridge and St. Vitus’ Cathedral. He considers the suburbs too, home to world-renowned soccer and ice hockey teams, gleaming shopping centers and grim communist-era apartment blocks that are often home to Vietnamese, Romany and Muslim minority groups who live in a city with a growing international outlook. The Prague he reveals is an increasingly confident and diverse city of the new Europe.