The Czech Avant-Garde Literary Movement Between the World Wars

This detailed study of the growth of Czech literature in the period between the end of WWI and the beginning of WWII considers how writers of the Czech literary avant-garde sought to combine high and low art and high and low language, such as spoken language, dialects, popular fiction, and popular entertainment. There is much information on translation issues. Writers discussed include Vitezslav Nezval, Jaroslave Seifert, and Vladislav Vancura. The book includes a list of works cited that have been translated into English and a list of publications in English. The book's readership includes advanced students and scholars in modern Czech literature, comparative literature, and Slavic literature. Annotation c2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Thomas G. Winner was born in Prague. He left Czechoslovakia in 1939 to attend Harvard University, where he had won one of the coveted fellowships designed to get students out of Nazi-occupied Europe. He received his BA and his MA from Harvard and his PhD from Columbia University. He was a Professor of Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature at Duke University, University of Michigan, and Brown University. At Brown he directed the Center for Research in Semiotics. He was awarded an honorary degree from Masaryk University in Brno in 1995. In 1997 he was awarded the Dobrovsky Medal from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, and in 1988 received the Laureate Memorial Medal on the occasion of the 650th anniversary of Charles University in Prague. His previous books include Kazakh Literature and Oral Art and Chekhov and His Prose as well as many edited volumes and over 160 scholarly articles.