Abstract
Book Chorus and dissonance. The History of Czech Literature 1947-1963 is a free continuation of the previous three-volume series History of the New ("New") Modernity and part of the long-term project of the Center for Recent Czech Literature of the Faculty of Arts of the University of South Bohemia.
In the first part of the book, the author's team, which consists of literary and art historians and theorists from the faculties of philosophy of South Bohemia and Charles University, deals with the cultural and ideological contexts of this complicated time when, after 1948, the communist regime in Czechoslovakia tried to manipulate the entire society in the name of realization the utopian project of the next social "paradise". In individual chapters, their authors attempt to describe and grasp these historical changes in official literature and culture.
However, attention is also paid to the - often isolated - cultural activities of defiant individuals or small groups who strove for free expression and an autonomous creative gesture, despite the totalitarian efforts to control them and close them with an impenetrable border that separated the so-called socialist camp from the rest of the world. The second part then maps the morphological transformations of individual literary genres in the given period - lyric, epic and drama, always with regard to their wider cultural and social context.
The book is also complemented by overviews of selected contemporary literary and cultural productions supplemented by important social and political events.