Political implications of Czech hist. drama, 1810-1935

This monograph was written as a post-doctoral thesis and explores, by means of a diachronic overview, the ways in which historical dramas in Czech literature changed between the outset of the process of Czechoslovakian national rebirth and the Wenceslaus jubilee celebrations in the 1930s. The investigation is based on the fundamental notion that allegorical structures in historical dramas point towards historical events above and beyond the story being portrayed, so that references to the time at which a given work is created become recognizable in the work itself. In this sense, two central elements pertaining to nation-building were put into practice in the historical dramas under study: the dissemination of historical imagery and the revival of historic events in a contemporary context, a function that has since been fulfilled primarily by the medium of film. An analytical corpus of almost 50 plays provides the basis for an analysis of the ways in which Czech language historical dramas changed and the extent to which contemporary events and shifts (such as the strenghtening of the national movement, the revolution of 1848, the beginnings of parliamentarianism, the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, conflicts between nationalities, the First World War, the dissolution of the monarchy, and the establishment of Czech statehood) left traces in the dramatic texts. At the same time, the work proffers an historical overview of the development of a genre which, despite its significance to cultural and theatre history, has been largely neglected in literary research. The first section investigates drama-related theory and questions relating to cultural studies that are relevant to historical drama as a genre. This part is not conceived in a language-specific context and as such can also be read without specific interest in Czech drama. The second part is a treatment of Czech historical drama in relation to the historical development of theatre which reached an institutional climax in the opening of the National Theatre in the 1880s, on the basis of individual text analyses. Following the individual text analyses, a comparative analysis of the plays about Saint Vclav/ Wenceslaus provides the basis for an investigation into the question of how macro-political changes are made manifest in the literary treatment of one and the same topic. The prime methodological challenge posed by this study, the establishment of an overview of the extensive corpus of plays and the diversity of the historical events on which they are based, is solved in the inclusion of graphics and diagrammes which portray conflicting elements in the individual works under study whilst at the same time offering a visual comparison between the plays.