Faith, Truth, Fidelity

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 věrnost ("faith(fulness)", "loyalty", "verity", "troth" etc. ) as the distinguishing feature of collections such as Seifert's Zhasněte světla or Halas' Torzo naděje 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.