Book chapter 56 views
Central Europe
Richard Robinson 
,
Julian Preece
,
Julian Preece
Europe in British Literature and Culture, Pages: 53 - 69
Swansea University Authors:
Richard Robinson , Julian Preece
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DOI (Published version): 10.1017/9781009425483.006
Abstract
This chapter answers the question ’does central Europe exist?’ by first drawing a literary-historical line between Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera, focusing particularly on the critical tensions in Kundera’s construction of a vanished culture and on the West’s mythologizing of central Europe. It then...
| Published in: | Europe in British Literature and Culture |
|---|---|
| ISBN: | 9781009425490 9781009425483 |
| Published: |
Cambridge
Cambridge University Press
2024
|
| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa67858 |
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| Abstract: |
This chapter answers the question ’does central Europe exist?’ by first drawing a literary-historical line between Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera, focusing particularly on the critical tensions in Kundera’s construction of a vanished culture and on the West’s mythologizing of central Europe. It then turns to two Prague-set novels, Bruce Chatwin’s Utz, which explores the condition of stubborn aesthetic individualism under communism, and Tom McCarthy’s Men in Space, set in the months following the splitting-up of Czechoslovakia in 1992. Beyond the Czech lands, the Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, a significant work of avant-garde feminism, offers a doomed fantasy of post-war Austro-Hungarian relationships. Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, set in the Polish–Silesian borderlands, is a revenge thriller whose narrator is inspired by the radicalism of William Blake. These case studies signal the ways central Europe has been confabulated by British writers; they also show how an evolving canon of fiction-in-translation is appropriately pluralizing and updating the West’s idea of the ‘middle’. |
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| Keywords: |
Central Europe; Austro-Hungarian Empire; Franz Kafka; Milan Kundera; Ingeborg Bachmann; Olga Tokarczuk; Bruce Chatwin; Tom McCarthy; communism; feminism |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Start Page: |
53 |
| End Page: |
69 |