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.

This book is linguistic in nature, offering a number of aspects of contemporary languages and their proverbs. Focusing mostly on lexical, semantic and pragmatic aspects, the book also explores language corpora findings. Apart from collecting data on proverbs from dozens of languages, there is an effort to map proverbs within a language in a systematic and reliable way. The book will prove useful to paremiologists, lexicographers, and comparative linguists.

This book focuses on the typological differences among the four most widely spoken Romance languages--French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish--and Czech. Utilizing findings from the Czech National Corpus’ massive language database, the authors analyze a range of linguistic categories to discover the differences and similarities between Czech and the Romance languages. Due to the massive amount of data mined, as well as the high number of languages examined, this book presents general and individual typological features of the four Romance languages and Czech that often exceed what has previously been accepted in the field of comparative linguistics.
 

Analyzes the historical significance of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. 

This book addresses different aspects of the Soviet army’s twenty-year presence in Czechoslovakia between 1968 and 1991. It explores the circumstances of the Soviet settling in the country, immediately related to the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies in August 1968; its active interference in the political developments in the early stage of the “normalization” era; and the universal support provided by the normalization era regime. It examines the darker side of this support when the constant favoring of Soviet interests—often to the detriment of the local population and the environment—went hand in hand with the resignation of the Czechoslovak state to lawfulness and the execution of effective administration on its territory. 

Based on extensive local and national primary sources, the volume describes the often problematic coexistence of the Soviet garrisons and local inhabitants, who did not have sufficient protection at the central level. In this context, it points out the contradictory logic that framed the mutual coexistence: the official policy of friendship on the one hand and the counter-intelligence protection of Soviet military premises on the other. Marie Cerná records the traces that the presence of the Soviet army left in the collective memory and examines the circumstances of its departure from the country in 1990 and 1991, which began immediately after the change of the political regime. She presents the long-term presence of the Soviet army as a fundamentally political and politicized matter, which was first the subject of power controversies and later of propaganda and intentional manipulation. 

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.