Abstract
A collection of studies deals with Czech literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It attempts to cover, describe and classify areas that have so far remained out of the spotlight of literary science.
These include, for example, ephemeral humoristic magazines published after 1848, fantastic works from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, or fictional reflections of the First World War. These types of texts include attempts to systematically organize the genre of a revival of historical short stories or natural lyricism of the last decades of the 19th century.
Greater interpretation was reflected in studies based on only a comparison of several texts. Whether they are connected by thematic closeness (eg. the theme of a dream in revival prose or a fictional picture of the events of 1848) or genre (eg. the revival of epistolary satire or a love epic of the 19th.century).
A special position is occupied methodologically focused study of Three Novels which deal with the rural prose of the late 19th century as well as the following article The Ghost of Havlíček and Other Problems, characterizing from textological perspective literary inheritance and the first edition of Karel Havlíček Borovský. The topic of the central study is the location of Neruda's magazine Images of Life in literary and national polemics at the turn of the 1850s and 1860s.
It attempts to characterize the movement that we consider to be crucial for the whole 19th century Czech culture and which we observe in most essays: the process of a gradual transformation of romantic culture into middle-class culture. In the book, the articles are organized into three thematic areas, which define the basic coordinates of the human position in the world (relation to society, temporal and spatial localization).