Böcker utgivna av Karolinum,Nakladatelstvi Univerzity Karlovy,Czech Republic

CZ;SK

CZ;SK

This publication, written by Czech professor of art history Jan Royt, renders a vivid image of the capital of the Bohemian Kingdom in the High Gothic period in the broader historical context of the circumstances that were particularly favourable for Prague during Charles IV's reign (1347-1378). For the first time in history, after Charles's coronation as the Holy Roman Emperor in 1355, the capital of the Lands of the Bohemian Crown was simultaneously the metropolis of the Holy Roman Empire. Thanks to the royal and imperial care, which in addition to Charles' monarchical post in Europe also reflected his Western-European education and cosmopolitan openness as well as his belief in and respect for the Premyslid tradition, Prague flourished, becoming a unique and beautiful city. The cathedral, the stone bridge, the university and construction of the New Town and its churches laid out in a magical cross pattern, remain today as the "stone seals" on the face of Prague's Gothic architecture, endorsed by the paintings, sculpture and the entire realm of spiritual culture. The book contains around 100 photographs of Prague monuments, sights and documentary images.

Written in the years 1954-57 and treating events from the Stalinist era of Czechoslovakia's postwar Communist regime, Midway upon the Journey of Our Life flew in the face of the reigning aesthetic of socialist realism, an anti-heroic novella informed by the literary theory of Viktor Shklovsky and constructed from episodes and lyrical sketches of the author and his neighbors' everyday life in industrial north Bohemia, set against a backdrop of historical and cultural upheaval. Jedlicka, like many if not most intellectuals of his generation, was a member of the Communist Party when it came to power in February 1948, but by fall he had resigned, and shortly after, as a result, he was expelled from his studies in ethnography and esthetics at Charles University in Prague. In 1952 he and his wife had a son, and when she was offered a position as a doctor in the border town of Litvinov in 1953, the family moved. Jedlicka worked odd jobs as a laborer and tutor, with occasional freelance assignments for radio, TV and magazines, while writing Midway at night. The title of the book comes from the opening line of Inferno from Dante's Divine Comedy. For Jedlicka, Litvinov was hell. Meditative and speculative reflections here alternate and overlap with fragmentary accounts of Jedlicka's own biography and slices of the lives of the people around him, typically rendered as overheard conversations. The narrative passages range in chronology from May 1945 to the early '50s, with sporadic leaps back and forth as the "characters" go about the business of "building a new society" and the mythology that goes with it. Jedlicka and his family were residents of the Koldum (Collective House), a grandiose socialist architectural project of communal living that fails in ways comic and tragicomic alike. Jedlicka doesn't neglect to portray the era's most momentous events, including the February 25, 1948, speech by Czechoslovakia's first Communist president, Klement Gottwald, on Prague's Old Town Square, which readers of Kundera will recognize from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and which Jedlicka witnessed firsthand. But while Kundera was concerned with the grand sweep of history, Jedlicka zeroes in on more personal and quotidian features of the new order. Due to its critical view of socialist society, Jedlicka was not able to publish Midway until 1966, after the easing of cultural control. Even then, however, parts of the book were censored, and the complete version did not appear until 1994.

An English translation that captures Vladislav Vancura's experimental style - or, as the author himself called it, "poetism in prose." It is presented alongside the original illustrations and typography and goes a long way toward deepening our understanding of the Czech spirit, humor, and way of life.

Novelist Bohumil Hrabal (1914-97) was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and spent decades working at a variety of laboring jobs before turning to writing in his late forties. This book offers a collection of stories that set in Hrabal's Kersko.

Peter Ackroyd's writing is obsessed with the defining heterogeneity of London--its rich diversity of human experience, mood, and emotion, of actions and events, and of the tools through which all of this heterogeneity is represented and reenacted. But for Ackroyd, one of the foremost of the so-called "London writers," this energizing heterogeneity also has a sinister side, largely originating outside social norms and mainstream pathways of cultural production. Touching on everything from occult practices to the plotting of radical groups, crime and fraud, dubious scientific experiments, and popular, dramatic forms of ritual and entertainment, Ackroyd contends that these forces both contest prescribed cultural modes and supply the city with its characteristic dynamism and capacity for spiritual renewal. This idiosyncratic London construct is particularly prominent in Ackroyd's novels, in which his ideas about the city's nature and his connection to English literary sensibilities combine to create a distinct chronotope with its own spatial and temporal properties. A Horror and a Beauty explores this world through six defining aspects of the city as Ackroyd identifies them: the relationship between London's past and present, its uncanny manifestations, its felonious tendencies, its inhabitants' psychogeographic and antiquarian strategies, its theatricality, and its inherently literary character.

The Czech king and Roman Emperor Charles IV met with the French king Charles V in Paris in 1378. Reconstructing the journey to this meeting with deft narrative talent, the author traces the king's progress from Prague to Paris, piecing together a modern chronicle from contemporary French scholarship and medieval literature.

The National Gallery in Prague has in its collection a unique Japanese illustrated manuscript of ogi no soshi, a genre of waka poems illustrated in fan-shaped pictures, which blossomed from the late Muromachi to the early Edo period. This is a facsimile of this ancient illustrated manuscript of waka poetry.

The chronically homeless face a stark reality: lack of access to support systems, adequate shelter, and sustenance, with little hope for something better. This book tells of homelessness among young people - the causes and their attitudes to the various problems they face.

A complete textbook for a course for English-language speakers who want to learn Czech. Based on a communicative and comparative approach, it presents the basics of the Czech language by means of continuous and systematic acquisition of vocabulary and conversational phrases grouped around useful topics and situations.

The Master of the Trebon Altarpiece was a painter active in Prague in the fourteenth century and one of the most important gothic artists of the international style. This book attempts to definitively identify and contextualize this unknown artist's oeuvre. It is suitable for scholars of art history as well as European art aficionados.

The generalization of microeconomics enables model descriptions of economic rationality, even in fields that standard microeconomics more or less avoids, like nonprofit sectors of market economies, altruism, or externalities. The authors argue, ultimately, that the generalizing criterion is a Darwinian maximization of the probability of survival.

A novel featuring Saturnin, a 'gentleman's gentleman' who obviously owes a debt to Wodehouse's beloved Jeeves, who wages a constant battle to protect his master from romantic disaster and intrusive relatives, such as Aunt Catherine, the 'Prancing Dictionary of Slavic Proverbs'.

What is it about human beings that makes us creative, able to imagine and enact new possibilities for life and new solutions to problems in a way that no other animal can? The authors explore this question in essays and studies from a range of specializations and backgrounds.

At the end of the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I forced the Irish Franciscans into exile, and they changed the course of Bohemian history in significant ways. This monograph documents this intense point of contact between two small European lands, Ireland and Bohemia, particularly those interested in Bohemia or the Irish diaspora.

Jan Opolsky has primarily been viewed as an undistinguished hanger-on in the era of Czech literary decadence. This title evaluates archival sources and private correspondence between Opolsky and other literary figures, and includes a classified bibliography of Opolsky's work. It is suitable for students of Slavic and European literary history.

Presents a concise summary of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics for physics students at the university level. This text covers essential topics, from general mathematical formalism to specific applications. It explains the formulation of quantum theory and is supported with illustrations of the general concepts of elementary quantum systems.

Czech action art emerged out of the political and social turmoil of the 1960s. This title explains the various forms of action art, from the actions and happenings of the 1960s; to the actions of land art; to the actions of a new generation of artists, who are using the principles of action art in contemporary postconceptual and participative art.