A new translation of a classic work of structuralist criticism.

Originally published in 1931, Otakar Zich’s Aesthetics of Dramatic Art laid the foundation for a systematic theory of modern theater and helped establish theater studies as an academic discipline. This volume is the first complete translation into any language and alongside Theatre Theory Reader: Prague School Writings provides thorough insight into Czech dramatic thought. Studying the theater from the audience’s perspective, Zich argues that the distinctive basis of dramatic art is human interaction rather than imitation, communication, fiction, or performed dialogue, as other theorists have argued. Covering spoken drama and opera, Zich’s Aesthetics of Dramatic Art is a foundational text of Czech theater practice that remains inspirational today for theater practitioners and theorists.

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.
 

The first collection of poetry in English by an acclaimed twentieth-century Czech writer.

From the eighth floor of a tower block in Central Europe, Jan Zábrana surveyed the twentieth century. He had been exiled from his own life by Communism. His parents were imprisoned, their health was broken, and he was not allowed to study languages in college. Refusing both to rebel outright or to cave in, he thought of himself as a dead man walking. “To all those who keep asking me to do things for them, I sometimes feel like saying: ‘But I’m dead. I died long ago. Why do you keep treating me as if I were one of the living?’”
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Yet during some of Europe’s most difficult years, he wrote The Lesser Histories, a collection of sixty-four sonnets that range through themes of age, sex, and political repression—a radiant testament to his times. The lines are emptied both of personal pathos and political stridency. Often Zábrana’s own voice segues into those of poets he had translated over the years, leaving only a bare shimmer of subjectivity—humorous, oblique, pained—with which to view his own works and days. The poems document a splendid and bitter isolation, and are immersed in the humor, hatreds, and loves of the everyday. Published in Czech in the ill-fated year of 1968, they subsequently fell into neglect. After the fall of Communism in 1989, Zábrana’s collected poems and selected diaries were published in Czech, and he was acclaimed as a major twentieth-century writer. Now, with this collection, he can begin to reach English-language readers for the first time.