Bøger udgivet af Karolinum,Nakladatelstvi Univerzity Karlovy,Czech Republic

Since the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989, Prague has become one of Europe‿s‿and the world‿s‿most popular tourist destinations. As in London, Paris, and Rome, visitors flock to the gorgeous buildings and monuments that grace the streets of Prague, entranced by structures ranging from Gothic and baroque to cubist and neoclassical. And while hundreds of thousands stroll over Charles Bridge and gaze up at St. Vitus Cathedral each year, far fewer venture away from the crowds to seek out the countless gems of art nouveau peppered throughout Prague. With Art Nouveau Prague, Petr Wittlich‿one of Europe‿s leading experts on nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture‿tours those monuments and buildings of Prague that are most representative of the art nouveau movement while offering insightful commentary on each. Along the way, Wittlich visits such sites as the Municipal House, the Wilson Railway Station, the Grand Hotel Europa, and works by sculptors František Bílek, Ladislav Šaloun, and Stanislav Sucharda. An introductory essay by Wittlich emphasizing the role of art nouveau within contemporary currents of modern European art accompanies more than one hundred color illustrations of some of the most stunning examples of art nouveau architecture and decoration in existence, and a detailed bibliography provides additional reading for each of the sites displayed in the book. Art Nouveau Prague is a must-have for those traveling to Prague for the first time or for anyone who appreciates or wants to learn more about art nouveau style.

A dreamlike novel that is a classic of dissident literature from Czechoslovakia, in English for the first time; Havel called it "a truly profound and perceptive account."

A study of the Raymond architectural studio's work to help rebuild Japan after WWII. Antonín Raymond in Japan examines the life and work of Noémi (1889--1980) and Antonín Raymond (1888-1976) and other architects within their firm tasked with rebuilding Japan after World War II. The recorded recollections of seven members of the Japanese Raymond studio depict the personalities of the Raymonds, comment on their work, and describe relationships with elite clients. Some of the almost two hundred illustrations in the book are published here for the first time, as little research has previously been conducted into Noémi Raymond's work until now. The Reader's Digest building in Tokyo, the Gunma Prefecture Music Center, and the Czechoslovak Embassy in Tokyo are discussed in detail. The book opens with Helena Capková's study of the pre-war activities of Raymond's company, with a focus on maintaining contacts during the Second World War. It closes with Irena Veverková's text about Antonín Raymond's contacts with Czechoslovakia after 1945.

Contextualizes the Czech Reformation in the setting of Prague University. The Czech Reformation offered a radical solution to the spiritual and institutional crisis of the late medieval church at the end of the fourteenth century. The beginnings of this reform are distinctly connected with Prague University, which drew many educated people to Prague from across Europe. Through John Hus--a former Prague University student who became its rector in 1402--the Czech Reformation gave rise to a new, radical ecclesiology. Not only did Hus challenge the hierarchical system of the church, but under his influence, the Czech Reformation acquired a specific national shape, and elements of Czech messianism emerged with the university. Prague, John Hus and Prague University explores that sentiment within Prague University, as well as its limits and restrictive consequences for the Czech Reformation and Czech medieval society. Emphasis is placed on showing how Prague and the university became a world that existed outside the Christian ecumenism of the time.

The first critical edition of Caesarius' Omelie morales de infantia Saluatoris--Homilies on Jesus' Childhood. Primarily known as the author of the Dialogus miraculorum--a collection of exemplary stories that secured his reputation as the master of Cistercian storytelling--Caesarius of Heisterbach was also the author of several sermons and homilies. Although they are not as well known today, his Homilies on Jesus' Childhood are exceptional in many ways. Readers will immediately notice Caesarius's versatility as he employs an impressive array of persuasive techniques: quoting scholarly works, interpreting Hebrew names and letters, delving into etymology and numerology, and including numerous examples to instruct both the learned and the common person.

An archeological history of the indigenous cultures of the Carpathian Basin. Baden, Kostolac, Vucedol and Vinkovci uses archaeology and genetics to create a novel cultural and historical interpretation of the Carpathian Basin during the Late Eneolithic period. The author traces the linear development of indigenous cultures from the Baden Culture through the Kostolac Culture to the Vucedol Culture, before positing that certain qualitative and quantitative shifts were driven by the entry of foreign populations--the Pit Grave Culture and the Bell Beaker Culture--into the Carpathian Basin. The book also analyzes the emergence of the Early Bronze Age, establishing an absolute chronology, and examines the Vucedol Culture's influence on geographically distant Bronze Age groups. An appendix also includes a discussion of findings that, while outside the Carpathian Basin, are part of its cultural sphere.

A history of the lost art of the Bohemian Ore Mountains. The development of mining towns in the Ore Mountain region of Bohemia during the thirteenth to the sixteenth century was driven by the Saxon nobility who brought with them the culture of their homeland. The art and architecture of the Ore Mountains, financed by wealthy miners and local nobility, therefore followed a different path than Prague yet rivaled its importance and grandeur. The Mining Towns of the Bohemian Ore Mountains introduces the most important mining centers and historical monuments, exploring what made the late Gothic and early Renaissance periods in northwest Bohemia so distinct from the rest of the kingdom. It also examines the specific cultural space that formed, where locals viewed the Bohemian-Saxon border as an abstract political concept that had little to do with day-to-day reality. The authors trace the monuments and works of art until the second half of the twentieth century when many of them tragically vanished because of lignite mining.

A dissident's deeply personal and unflinching view of Soviet oppression in Czechoslovakia in the wake of the 1968 invasion. Seven Days to the Funeral is the fictionalized memoir of Ján Rozner, a leading Slovak journalist, critic, dramaturg, and translator. Rozner and his wife Zora Jesenská were champions of the Prague Spring and were blacklisted after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. When Jesenská died in 1972, her funeral became a political event and attendees faced recriminations. A painstaking account of the week after his wife's death, Seven Days to the Funeral is a historical record of the devastating impact of the period after the invasion. Through ruthless portraits of key figures in Slovak culture, the book provides a fascinating cultural history of Slovakia from 1945 to 1972. It is also a moving love story of an unlikely couple. Although Rozner began the book in 1976, it was left unfinished upon his death. The book was published posthumously in 2009 by his second wife Sláva Roznerová.

An inclusive collection of modern Czech short fiction that features overlooked women writers. Bringing together Czech fiction published by women between 1890 and 1910, Beyond the World of Men presents works that confront pivotal issues of the time, including the "woman question" and women's rights, class conflict, lesbian love, and the relationship between the aristocracy and the Czech peasantry (as in two stories originally written in German by the aristocrat Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach). The collection contains stories that are of literary merit, but also hold historical value. In these works, the authors offer trenchant social commentary while injecting both comic and sentimental elements into their writing, employing humanity and subtlety. As a whole, the collection suggests a revision of the critical understanding of Czech literary modernism; these writers represent voices that were not usually heard in the male writing of the period. They also demand evaluation in their differing (but constant) reactions to earlier women's writing in Czech and in other European languages, but particularly that of the central figure of Božena Nemcová, to whose canonic novel Babicka they constantly return.

An original study of radio propaganda in Czechoslovakia. Between 1939 and 1945, Czechoslovakia disappeared from the maps, existing only as an imagined 'free republic' on the radio waves. Following the German invasion and annexation of Bohemia and Moravia and the declaration of independence by Slovakia on 15 March 1939, the Czechoslovak Republic was gone. From their position in exile in wartime London, former Czechoslovak President Edvard Benes and the government that formed around him depended on radio to communicate with the public they strove to represent. The broadcasts made by government figures in London enabled a performance of authority to impress their hosts, allies, occupying enemies, and claimed constituents. This book examines this government program for the first time, making use of previously unstudied archival sources to examine how the exiles understood their mission and how their propaganda work was shaped by both British and Soviet influences. This study assesses the strengths, weaknesses, and limitations of the government's radio propaganda as they navigated the complexities of exile, with chapters examining how they used the radio to establish their authority, how they understood the past and future of the Czechoslovak nation, and how they struggled to include Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia within it.

An analysis of "nudging" as a tool for influencing human health behavior. Behavioral economics sees "nudges" as ways to encourage people to re-evaluate their priorities in such a way that they voluntarily change their behavior, leading to personal and social benefits. This book examines nudging as a tool for influencing human behavior in health policy. The authors investigate the contemporary scientific discourse on nudging and enrich it with an ontological, epistemological, and praxeological analysis of human behavior. Based on analyses of the literature and a systemic review, the book defines nudging tools within the paradigm of prospect theory. In addition to the theoretical contribution, Nudging also examines and offers suggestions on the practice of health policy regarding obesity, malnutrition, and especially type 2 diabetes mellitus.

This book blurs the line between high and low culture throughout literary history. The common story in literary studies is that the emergence of popular and junk literature is related to the emergence of modern society due to the rise of literacy and the shortening of workdays. Ancient Weeds upends this misconception by demonstrating that antiquity had its fair share of literary pieces that fit the definition of popular, trivial, and junk literature. The authors analyze artifacts such as the ancient Egyptian Turin Papyrus, ancient love novels, Christian hagiographies and passion plays, lives of Jesus and Marian hymns, Byzantine parodies of liturgical procedure, Old Norse tales and lying sagas, Arabic maqams, and Spanish blind romances. Through numerous excerpts, it becomes clear that the line between junk and high literature is thinner than it seems. They reveal how seemingly low themes such as sex and violence often overlap with the themes of high literature. In many cases, low literature is more imaginative and subversive than canonical texts, and bizarreness and non-conformity do not necessarily equate to the ephemerality of a work. As Ancient Weeds shows, thousands of years after it was written, low literature can still be a great source of entertainment today.

A critical examination of the history of Israel. When did Israel begin? The origins of ancient Israel are shrouded in mystery, and those hoping to explore the issue must utilize resources from three different fields--archaeology, epigraphy, and biblical texts--and then examine their interrelations while keeping in mind that the name Israel was not used to describe just one state but referred to numerous entities at different times. Archaeology, History, and Formation of Identity in Ancient Israel provides a critical reading of Israel's history. It is neither a harmonizing reading, which takes the picture painted by texts as a given fact, nor a reading supporting biblical texts with archaeological and epigraphic data; instead, it offers the reader multiple options to understand biblical narratives on a historical and theological level. In addition to presenting the main currents in the field, the book draws upon the latest discoveries from Czech-Israeli excavations to offer new hypotheses and reconstructions based on the interdisciplinary dialogue between biblical studies, archaeology, and history.

A complete history of Bohemian architecture during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries forms one of the most important chapters in the cultural history of Bohemia. In this period, art attained a remarkably high level, with Bohemia emerging as a rival to the other cultural centers of Europe. This was especially true in terms of architecture, which not only transformed the appearance of towns and villages in Bohemia but also played a part in the creation of the phenomenon known as the Baroque, which to this day remains an essential part of Czech cultural identity. The monumental Baroque Architecture in Bohemia brings together multiple generations of art historians from Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences to offer the single most comprehensive examination and exploration of Bohemian architecture during this extraordinary period. The book begins with the Renaissance roots of Baroque Bohemia: it introduces readers to the influence of the cultured and eccentric Rudolf II, who moved the seat of the Holy Roman Empire back to Prague, inviting foreign artists, architects, and alchemists with him; it shows the importance of Albrecht von Wallenstein, whose military success in the Thirty YearsâEUR(TM) War heralded a massive building campaign that helped usher in the Baroque age. When the book moves to the period commonly understood as the Baroque, it discusses leading Czech architects, such as Jan BlaÅ¿ej Santini-Aichel and Kilian Ignaz Dientzenhofer, but also focuses on lesser-known regional architects and the important Italian architects and artists that left their mark on Bohemia. The architectural and artistic developments are all set among the broader cultural and social context of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book contains extensive pictorial documentationâEUR"most impressively Vladimír Uher and Martin MickaâEUR(TM)s gorgeous architectural photographs.

A critical examination of the life and legacy of Charles IV. Charles IV, King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, has been called "one of the most learned and diplomatically skillful sovereigns" of the fourteenth century. Having moved the seat of the Holy Roman Empire to Prague and founding the first university in Central Europe, Charles IV is a towering figure in Czech history and a crucial character in the story of medieval Europe. Recent research, especially in art history, has tended to present Charles IV in a purely positive, unblemished light: viewing him and his imperial court as the engine behind a flourishing of culture in the region. This book views Charles IV through a more critical lens, examining the careful construction that went into the way he presented himself and the characteristic manifestations of Charles' execution of royal power. The first part of the book offers a chronological description of Charles' life within the broader context of the times and the House of Luxembourg. The second part provides a close look into Charles IV's style of rule while focusing on phenomena that reveal his personal conception of power and how it was wielded.

A rethinking of Cantor and infinitary mathematics by the creator of VopĿnka's principle.   The dominant current of twentieth-century mathematics relies on Georg Cantor‿s classical theory of infinite sets, which in turn relies on the assumption of the existence of the set of all natural numbers, the only justification for which‿a theological justification‿is usually concealed and pushed into the background. This book surveys the theological background, emergence, and development of classical set theory, warning us about the dangers implicit in the construction of set theory, and presents an argument about the absurdity of the assumption of the existence of the set of all natural numbers. It instead proposes and develops a new infinitary mathematics driven by a cautious effort to transcend the horizon bounding the ancient geometric world and mathematics prior to set theory, while allowing mathematics to correspond more closely to the real world surrounding us. Finally, it discusses real numbers and demonstrates how, within a new infinitary mathematics, calculus can be rehabilitated in its original form employing infinitesimals.

Bohemian Jewish culture and literature during the underexamined 1820s to 1880s. This book on Jewish culture and literature focuses on the "quiet" decades of the nineteenth century, a scarcely written-about period of time in Bohemian Jewish history. Using a myriad of sources, including travelers' accounts, poems, essays, short stories, guides, and newspaper articles, the volume explores Jewish expression, Jewish-Czech relations, and the changing attitudes toward Jews between the 1820s and 1880s. It offers close readings of writers like Karel Havlícek Borovský, Ján Kollár, Siegfried Kapper, and Jan Neruda, as well as lesser-known authors and sources. Combining skillful sustained analysis, judicious argumentation, and elegant writing, the book is a truly enriching reading experience.

A comprehensive reader on the Czech literary avant-garde.   In recent years a prominent trend in the study of European modernism and the avant-garde has been increased attention to texts and traditions that have long stood in the shadow of the French, German, and British traditions that dominate the canon. Yet this more expansive view of European modernism and the avant-garde has been hindered by the limited range of texts available outside the original languages. This book addresses that problem by offering a wide-ranging selection of literary, theoretical, and documentary sources from one of the most dynamic and original European avant-garde traditions: that of the first Czechoslovak Republic and of the Bohemian lands. The Czech avant-garde is in many respects the ideal "alternative" avant-garde to present in detail to a wider readership: it tracks Central European developments and was often influential internationally while being deeply embedded in particular cultural dynamics that produced original forms. This volume returns interwar Czech avant-garde writings to their place as a firmly embedded component of the European avant-garde.

A lavishly illustrated exploration of forward-looking Czech art around the turn of the twentieth century. Though it's less widely heralded than Berlin and Vienna, 1890s Prague was every bit as much a fin-de-siècle cultural center as its Mittel European peers. At the end of the nineteenth century, the city found itself home to a fervent coterie of young visual artists all deliberately pushing against--indeed, seeking to secede from--the traditional artistic structures of the day. ​ This book traces Czech Secessionist art from the turn of the twentieth century by following its three main stylistic schools: naturalistic-impressionistic, symbolist, and ornamental-decorative. Though these styles developed separately, their symbiotic relationship gives the art a deeper significance and disrupts the traditional understanding of Art Nouveau and Secessionist art as an eclectic decorative style that faded away at the beginning of the twentieth century. Illustrated with more than three hundred color plates, Czech Secession is a fittingly lush tribute to one city's underappreciated and forward-looking artistic blossoming.

A paranoid thriller of life under surveillance in Soviet Czechoslovakia. A deputy minister in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Ludvík enjoys all the luxuries that success in the party affords him, but he must be careful: he's under no illusions about the secret police bugging his apartment. Luckily, he and his wife, Anna, know where the bug is and where they can safely converse. However, any comfort they feel disappears the evening they attend an official party, where they learn that Ludvík's boss has just been arrested after presenting a report written by Ludvík himself. Is Ludvík next? Back home after the party, the couple must get past unresolved marital tensions to get rid of absolutely anything that could incriminate them--all while contending with the strange men outside their apartment and the bug inside. ​ Penned under the oppressive watch of Soviet authorities in 1960s Czechoslovakia--but touching on still-current themes of surveillance and paranoia--this cinematic thriller is as tense and timely as ever. A promising Party member who became persona non grata after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, author Jan Procházka knew firsthand the gnawing terror of life in a surveillance state: after his death in 1971, the new tenants of his apartment discovered twelve hidden listening devices. As Ear makes terrifyingly clear, the most frightening horror stories are the ones closest to everyday reality.

Drawing on continental philosophy, Devouring One's Own Tail examines culture and society as a type of ouroboros. Inspired by Niklas Luhmann's theories on social systems, this book examines the concept of autopoiesis, or self-creation, as it relates to society and culture. Approaching the concept from a variety of fields--philosophy, philology, aesthetics, linguistics, archaeology, and religious and media studies--the contributors present the products of humanity as self-referential, self-sustaining, and self-creating systems. Through four sections, the book addresses the philosophical concept of autopoiesis and its relations to creativity, destruction, and self-organization; autopoiesis in literature and art history; autopoiesis in religion; and autopoiesis in historiography, cognitive linguistics, and social media. Whether exploring Hegel's theory of knowledge or the viral spread of conspiracy theories on the internet, the authors concentrate on the ouroboros-like nature of their subjects in the ways they feed off of themselves.

Postcolonial reflections on Indonesia's influence upon the avant-garde poetry of a non-colonial European. In 1926, the Communist avant-garde poet Konstantin Biebl (1898-1951) traveled from Czechoslovakia to the Dutch East Indies. In the writings from his journal-texts simultaneously poetic and comic-both landlocked Bohemia and the colonized tropical islands are seen in disorienting new perspectives, like "mirrors looking at themselves in each other." ​ Jan Mrázek's On This Modern Highway, Lost in the Jungle takes us on a journey of our own, crisscrossing Biebl's life and work-with particular attention to his travel writing-as they mirror Mrázek's own experiences as a multinational academic: a Prague conservatory graduate, educated at Michigan and Cornell, and now a scholar of Indonesia living in Singapore. Biebl's writings are also the book's point of departure for a broader exploration of the intersections of travel and poetry, issues of colonial and social injustice, and the representation of otherness in the Czech literary and visual imagination. In its attention to how poetic travel reflects the Czech historical experience in the shadow of imperial nations, Mrázek's book elevates scholarly reflection on literary travel, modernity, and colonialism to a new level.

An examination of the cultural and artistic consequences of post-WWI nationalism in Europe. World War I was a seismic event in Europe whose most concrete ramifications were the sweeping changes made to maps of the continent after 1918. A number of new, independent states were established in the wake of the Armistice, and these tectonic developments found varied expression in the arts, transforming the image of the continent both cartographically and artistically. This new edited collection focuses primarily on how modernism and the avant-garde responded to these geographic changes in Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltic States, and Scandinavia. The contributors explore the clashes between the national, the transnational, and the cosmopolitan as they played out in diverse artistic genres. In many countries across Europe, the struggle for national independence--which in many cases began in the nineteenth century and culminated only after World War I--had important cultural and artistic consequences, which are only beginning to be understood. This book--copublished with Artefactum--provides a crucial new lens to rethink the methodological tools used to understand the complexity and the multiplicity of avant-garde forms in twentieth-century Europe, encouraging scholars to reconstruct global cultural history without tired nationalistic approaches.

Traces the history of visual representations of anti-Jewish hatred in Czech Bohemia. The vicious scourges of religion-based anti-Judaism and ethnically-rooted anti-Semitism are tragically deep-seated aspects of Czech Bohemian history. Images of Malice--copublished with Artefactum--examines visual instances from the well-known low points of historic Bohemian anti-Semitic resentment, while also recasting common views of eras not typically associated with rises in virulent anti-Jewish sentiment. This mapping of the visual signs of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism is also an account of their broader meaning, as the processes of stereotyping, delegitimization, dehumanization, and exclusion from society represent a more dire and universal problem. As Images of Malice makes bracingly clear, the danger of anti-Jewish visuals is still an urgent problem today, in Europe and beyond.

A crucial contribution to Romani studies focuses on a single Slovak village to explore universal issues of belonging.   In this important contribution to contemporary Romani studies, Jan Ort focuses his anthropological research on a village in eastern Slovakia reputed for the ostensibly seamless coexistence of its ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous inhabitants. Ort offers an ethnographic critique of this idyllic view, showing how historical shifts, as well as the naturalization of inequality and hierarchies, have led to the present situation between the village‿s Roma inhabitants and other ethnic populations. However, he also shows examples and methods of subversion and resistance to the village‿s current power dynamics. Based primarily on participant observation within Roma families, Ort‿s long-term research results in a fascinating book replete with ethnographic descriptions that allow readers to understand local experiences, contexts, and divisions. These insights about the village lead to the key question of the book: Who actually is a local? Â