Faith, Truth, Fidelity

Poetry not only as a sign of faith(fulness) or call for loyalty, but a constructor thereof in its own right.

Though frequently acknowledged as a remarkable phase within Czech literary history, the poetic outpouring in the build-up to and aftermath of the Munich Agreement has received comparatively little rigorous scholarly attention to date. In this study, Frances Jackson seeks redress to the balance, drawing on a range of theoretical instruments, including the idea of the event in both a narratological and more philosophical sense, and notions of rhetoric and authenticity. She establishes vrnost ("faith(fulness)", "loyalty", "verity", "troth" etc.) as the distinguishing feature of collections such as Seifert's Zhasnte svtla or Halas' Torzo nadje and demonstrates how this can be constructed poetically. Rather than viewing the period as a watershed moment per se, the study also situates its output within the context of late modernism, highlighting important parallels with contemporaneous English-language works.

Auteur
Frances Jackson studied German, Czech and East European Studies in Oxford, Brno and Munich. She lives and works in Munich.