Search results for ""Karolinum,Nakladatelstvi Univerzity Karlovy,Czech Republic""

Since its birth as a city, Prague's appearance, character, and life have been shaped by the River Vltava. The flow of the river enabled the settlement of the Prague basin, the creation of the capital of the Bohemian Kingdom, and, later, the Czech state. In the course of their joint history, the city has gradually tamed the river, and as Prague has changed, so too has its river. This exquisitely illustrated book celebrates both the historical and living bond between Prague and the Vltava. After first exploring the river's major transformations most radically those of the nineteenth century, when the river banks became riverside roads, centers of social life, and elegant promenades all overhung with architecturally imposing grand houses Katerina Beckova takes readers on a stroll, in photographs, through the contemporary city. She tells the stories of its flour mills, bridges, islands, embankments, monuments, and community spaces, linking unique, riverside panoramic views of the town with fascinating insight into the evolution of Prague's everyday life over time. Also including historical and documentary illustrations, maps, and lists of key figures, locations, and landmarks (both today's and yesterday's) with the various names they have had over the centuries, Prague: A City and Its River is both a cultural guide and beautiful work of art an enlightening homage to the river that continues to shape one of the most historic and beautiful capitals of Eastern Europe.

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BASIC CZECH is a modern textbook of Czech as a foreign language based on English, a sequel to Basic Czech I and Basic Czech II. It consists of six units (approx. 2000 words and phrases) and it is based on communicative and comparative approach. The textbook can be used in intensive as well as two-semester and other types of classes. It is also suitable for self-study. It provides the key to all exercises. All words and phrases are included in the Czech-English word list at the end of each unit. The grammatical and lexical topics covered in this volume exceed the level we commonly call basic. Nevertheless to preserve the formal continuity of all three volumes, we have kept the title Basic Czech. Grammar and vocabulary covered corresponds with level B1-B2 of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.

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At the end of the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I forced the Irish Franciscans into exile. Of the four continental provinces to which the Irish Franciscans fled, the Prague Franciscan College of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary was the largest in its time. This monograph documents this intense point of contact between two small European lands, Ireland and Bohemia. The Irish exiles changed the course of Bohemian history in significant ways, both positive - the Irish students and teachers of medicine who contributed to Bohemia's culture and sciences - and negative - the Irish officers who participated in the murder of Albrecht of Valdstejn and their successors who served in the Imperial forces. Dealing with a hitherto largely neglected theme, Parez and Kucharova attempt to place the Franciscan College within Bohemian history and to document the activities of its members. This wealth of historical material from the Czech archives, presented in English for the first time, will be of great aid for international researchers, particularly those interested in Bohemia or the Irish diaspora.

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Jan Opolsky has primarily been viewed as an undistinguished hanger-on in the era of Czech literary decadence. Through close reading and detailed analysis of Opolsky's prose, however, Peter Butler argues that, far from his reputation as a literary lackey, Opolsky is a master of sustained narrative irony and an accomplished writer in his own right. Beyond Decadence evaluates archival sources and private correspondence between Opolsky and other literary figures, and includes a classified bibliography of Opolsky's work. Butler's introduction, meanwhile, offers an overview of the Czech decadent/symbolist literary and artistic movements, placing them within a larger European perspective. Redeeming a literary artist who has been nearly forgotten in the English-speaking world, Beyond Decadence will be of particular interest to students of Slavic and European literary history.

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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, Frantisek Smahel traces the king's progress from Prague to Paris, piecing together a modern chronicle from contemporary French scholarship and medieval literature. The result is an appealing account of medieval life, everyday intellectualism, grand European politics of the time, and even medieval cuisine. Smahel sets the stage by presenting details of the life of Charles IV, including his early days in Paris and the political and international goals of his father, John of Bohemia. The author then presents a transcription of richly illustrated French chronicles of the historic meeting and offers an analysis of the importance of the conclave of the two most powerful European rulers of the time. Finally, Smahel considers, in individual studies, the practical organization of medieval festivities, including their logistics, transportation, culinary details, court manners, relationships, and symbols.With techniques borrowed from the fields of archaeology and microhistory as well as cultural anthropology and iconography, The Paris Summit, 1377-78 is a highly readable account of medieval lives and times that will appeal to historians as well as nonacademic audiences.

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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.

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These three volumes form a complete textbook for a course for English-language speakers who want to learn Czech. The first volume 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. Basic Czech II is structured similarly, but it moves students from beginning to intermediate work, gradually delving into more complicated issues of grammar and usage. It includes a compact disc that features audio exercises built around texts and dialogues that the student will have learned in the first volume. Basic Czech III is based on a communicative and comparative approach, and is suitable for intensive study or even for self-directed study. Grammatical and lexical topics covered in this volume go beyond the basic level, into intermediate and even advanced language study.

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A clever investigation into two unsolved mysteries of poetic authorship. The technique known as contemporary stylometry uses different methods, including machine learning, to discover a poem’s author based on features like the frequencies of words and character n-grams. However, there is one potential textual fingerprint stylometry tends to ignore: versification, or the very making of language into verse. Using poetic texts in three different languages (Czech, German, and Spanish), Petr Plecháč asks whether versification features like rhythm patterns and types of rhyme can help determine authorship. He then tests his findings on two unsolved literary mysteries. In the first, Plecháč distinguishes the parts of the Elizabethan verse play The Two Noble Kinsmen written by William Shakespeare from those written by his coauthor, John Fletcher. In the second, he seeks to solve a case of suspected forgery: how authentic was a group of poems first published as the work of the nineteenth-century Russian author Gavriil Stepanovich Batenkov? This book of poetic investigation should appeal to literary sleuths the world over.

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Drawing on continental philosophy, Devouring One’s Own Tail examines culture and society as a type of ouroboros. Inspired by Niklas Luhmann’s theories on social systems, this book examines the concept of autopoiesis, or self-creation, as it relates to society and culture. Approaching the concept from a variety of fields—philosophy, philology, aesthetics, linguistics, archaeology, and religious and media studies—the contributors present the products of humanity as self-referential, self-sustaining, and self-creating systems. Through four sections, the book addresses the philosophical concept of autopoiesis and its relations to creativity, destruction, and self-organization; autopoiesis in literature and art history; autopoiesis in religion; and autopoiesis in historiography, cognitive linguistics, and social media. Whether exploring Hegel’s theory of knowledge or the viral spread of conspiracy theories on the internet, the authors concentrate on the ouroboros-like nature of their subjects in the ways they feed off of themselves.

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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.

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A rethinking of Cantor and infinitary mathematics by the creator of Vopěnka's principle. The dominant current of twentieth-century mathematics relies on Georg Cantor’s classical theory of infinite sets, which in turn relies on the assumption of the existence of the set of all natural numbers, the only justification for which—a theological justification—is usually concealed and pushed into the background. This book surveys the theological background, emergence, and development of classical set theory, warning us about the dangers implicit in the construction of set theory, and presents an argument about the absurdity of the assumption of the existence of the set of all natural numbers. It instead proposes and develops a new infinitary mathematics driven by a cautious effort to transcend the horizon bounding the ancient geometric world and mathematics prior to set theory, while allowing mathematics to correspond more closely to the real world surrounding us. Finally, it discusses real numbers and demonstrates how, within a new infinitary mathematics, calculus can be rehabilitated in its original form employing infinitesimals.

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Born January 1, 1993, after the split with Slovakia, the Czech Republic is one of the youngest members of the European Union. Despite its youth, this new state and the areas just outside its modern borders boast an ancient and intricate past. With A History of the Czech Lands, editors Jaroslav Panek and Oldrich Tuma-along with several scholars from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and Charles University - provide one of the most complete historical accounts of this region to date. Panek and Tuma's history begins in the Neolithic Era and follows the development of the state as it transformed into the Kingdom of Bohemia during the ninth century, into a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into Czechoslovakia after World War I, and finally into the Czech Republic. Such a tumultuous political past arises in part from a fascinating native people, and A History of the Czech Lands profiles the Czechs in great detail, delving into past and present traditions and explaining how generation after generation adapted to a perpetually changing government and economy. In addition, contributors examine the many minorities that now call these lands home - Jews, Slovaks, Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, and others - and how each group's migration to the region has contributed to life in the Czech Republic today. With sixty new illustrations and an additional chapter examining the transformation of the Czech Republic from a post-communist country into a member of the European Union, this new edition of A History of the Czech Lands will be essential for scholars of Slavic, Central, and East European studies and a must-read for those who trace their ancestry to these lands.

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In the repressive context of East European Communist regimes, how did young girls and boys come to realize their sexuality? What did they do with that self-awareness--and later on, as adults, what strategies did they employ in their dealings with the regime? Queer Encounters with Communist Power answers these questions as it interweaves a groundbreaking queer oral history project with meticulous, original research into the discourse on homosexuality and transsexuality in Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1989. Contrary to expectations, the book reveals that despite the Czechoslovak Communist regime's brutality in many areas of life, the state did not carry out a hateful or seditious campaign against homosexual and non-heterosexual people. Rather, the official state sexology offices functioned from the late 1970s onward as essentially the first gay clubs in socialist Czechoslovakia. Interweaving the memories of non-heterosexual Czech women born between 1929 and 1952, Vera Sokolov 's study both enriches and challenges existing scholarship on lesbian and gay history during this era, promising to radically change the way we view gender, sexuality, and everyday life during East European socialism.

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A new edition of a classic of Czech literature and literary comedy. Upon its initial publication in Czech in 1942, Saturnin was a bestseller. This is entirely appropriate, for while Saturnin draws on a tradition of Czech comedy and authors such as J. Hašek, K. Capek, and K. Polácek, it was also clearly influenced by the English masters Jerome K. Jerome and P. G. Wodehouse. Saturnin is the story of a young man in love and his faithful servant Saturnin, who upsets the peaceful rhythm of his master's domestic arrangements and turns his life inside out. He lures him into an exotic world where he is forced to live dangerously, and he shows him how to cope with any situation. Saturnin lays bare the weaknesses of others and compels them to disclose their true naturehe is a subversive servant. Written at a time when Czechoslovakia was deep in the grip of the Nazi occupation, Saturnin showed how one form of resistance was to put the world created by invasion out of your mind and create anoth

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A crucial contribution to Romani studies focuses on a single Slovak village to explore universal issues of belonging. In this important contribution to contemporary Romani studies, Jan Ort focuses his anthropological research on a village in eastern Slovakia reputed for the ostensibly seamless coexistence of its ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous inhabitants. Ort offers an ethnographic critique of this idyllic view, showing how historical shifts, as well as the naturalization of inequality and hierarchies, have led to the present situation between the village’s Roma inhabitants and other ethnic populations. However, he also shows examples and methods of subversion and resistance to the village’s current power dynamics. Based primarily on participant observation within Roma families, Ort’s long-term research results in a fascinating book replete with ethnographic descriptions that allow readers to understand local experiences, contexts, and divisions. These insights about the village lead to the key question of the book: Who actually is a local?

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Tomáš Špidlík: A Theological Life offers one of the first comprehensive reflections on the life and work of the enigmatic Czech theologian. In part one, Karel Sládek explores Špidlík’s thoughts on family, the formation of Jesuit priests, the ecumenical mission of the monastery at Velehrad in Moravia (where Špidlík himself studied), and the wisdom he acquired during stays in Rome. The latter part of the book focuses on Špidlík’s spiritual theology, which was grounded in a synthesis of Eastern and Western Christianity. Here, the book explores subjects such as the Holy Spirit, the Eucharist as a source of spiritual life, and the influence of the Philokalia on Eastern spirituality. By the conclusion, we see Špidlík’s most mature ideas and his forming of a theology of beauty; Špidlík spent his final years in Rome, living and working at the Centro Aletti’s renowned art studio, where he put his mind to observing the theology of art for an understanding of music, film, literature, and iconography.

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In honor of the 2018 centennial of Czech independence, philosopher of law Jir Prib n and award-winning Czech journalist Karel Hv zdala took the opportunity to examine key moments in Czech history from the ninth century to the twenty-first. Covering such a broad span of time allowed them to look into the past and question how Czechs have viewed their history at different points--and what that means for the Czech present and future. As contemporary politics drift closer towards totalitarianism, historiography from scholars and thinkers who experienced twentieth-century totalitarian regimes is more important than ever. In their spirited dialogue, Hv zdala and Prib n raise and explore these crucial issues, sharing subjects normally reserved for university seminars with the broader public.

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It’s 1979 in Communist Czechoslovakia, ten years into the crushing period known as normalization, and Ludvík Vaculík has writer’s block. It has been nearly a decade since he wrote his powerful novel, The Guinea Pigs, and it was in 1968 that he wrote his anti-regime manifesto, Two Thousand Words, which the Soviet Union used as a pretext for invading Czechoslovakia. On the advice of his friend, the poet and surrealist painter Jiří Kolář, Vaculík begins to keep a diary, “a book about things, people, and events.” This marks the beginning of A Czech Dreambook. Fifty-four weeks later, what Vaculík turns out to have written is a unique mixture of diary, dream journal, and outright fiction—an inverted roman à clef in which the author, his family, his mistresses, and the real leaders of the Czech underground play major roles. Undisputedly the most debated novel among the Prague dissident community of the 1980s, it is a work that Vaculík himself described as an amalgam of “hard-boiled documentary” and “magic fiction,” while Václav Havel called it “a truly profound and perceptive account. . . . A great novel about modern life and the crisis of contemporary humanity.” A Czech Dreambook has been hailed as the most important work of Czech literature in the past forty years. And yet it has never before been available in English. Flawlessly translated by Gerald Turner, Vaculík’s masterpiece is a brilliant exercise in style, dry humor, and irony—an important portrait of the lives and longings of the dissidents and post-Communist elites.

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Every five years from 1955 to 1985, mass Czechoslovak gymnastic demonstrations and sporting parades called Spartakiads were held to mark the 1945 liberation of Czechoslovakia. Featuring hundreds of thousands of male and female performers of all ages and held in the world’s largest stadium—a space built expressly for this purpose—the synchronized and unified movements of the Czech citizenry embodied, quite literally, the idealized Socialist people: a powerful yet pliant force directed by the regime. In this book, Petr Roubal explores the political, social, and aesthetical dimensions of these mass physical demonstrations, with a particular focus on their roots in the völkisch nationalism of the German Turner movement and the Czech Sokol gymnastic tradition. Roubal draws on extensive interviews and archival research to investigate the many facets of this sporting tradition, from the reactions of ordinary, non-political gymnasts who appropriated and challenged official rituals to the organizational demands of the Spartakiads, such as the incredible finances involved and the knowledge and skills required from hundreds of former Sokol officials. Featuring an abundance of archival photographs, Spartakiad takes a new approach to Communist history by opening a window onto the mentality and mundanity behind the Iron Curtain.

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In this book, Czech lawyer and scholar Jakub Drápal tells the story of the life of Kamill Resler, an attorney who defended the most prominent Nazi tried in postwar Czechoslovakia: Karl Hermann Frank, who would go on to be executed for his role in organizing the massacres of the Czech villages Lidice and Ležáky in 1942. Celebrating Resler’s lifelong commitment to justice—to honoring even the most nefarious criminals’ right to a defense—Drápal highlights events that influenced Resler’s outlook and legal career, important cases that preceded Frank’s trial, Resler’s subsequent defenses of other Nazi criminals, and the final years of Resler’s life under the communist regime.

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Compassion, levity, and laughter can be found in the darkest of places--and even in the smallest of creatures. Set in 1943 Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, J. R. Pick's novella Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals tells the story of Tony, a thirteen-year-old boy who is deported from Prague to the infamous Terezi-n ghetto for Jews--the horrific, overcrowded concentration camp where one in four prisoners died of starvation or disease, and a way station on the way to Auschwitz. But it is not the atrocities Tony experiences that make his tale remarkable. It is his ability to find comedy in the incomprehensible. Tony suffers from tuberculosis, and, lying in his hospital bed one day, he decides to set up an animal welfare organization. Even though no animals are permitted in the camp, he is determined to find just one creature he can care for and protect--and his determination is contagious. A group of older boys including Tony's best friend, Ernie, aid him in his quest. Soon they're joined by Tony's mother--and her coterie of boyfriends. Eventually, they find Tony his pet: a mouse, which he names and carefully guards in a box hidden beneath his bed. But in the fall of 1944, the transports to Auschwitz begin. As moving as it is irreverent, Pick's novella draws on the two years he spent imprisoned in Terezi-n in his late teens. With cutting black humor, he shines a light on both the absurdities and injustices of the Nazi-run Jewish ghetto, using his literary artistry to portray in stunning shorthand an experience of the Holocaust that pure histories could never convey.

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From Howard’s End to Brideshead Revisited, this book explores the leitmotif of the English country house in twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction, with a focus on the works of E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Iris Murdoch, Alan Hollinghurst, and Sarah Waters. Integrating wider social and cultural contexts with contemporary architectural developments, Tereza Topolovská reveals that the variety of literary depictions of the country house reflects the physical diversification of buildings that can be classified as such, from smaller variants to formerly grand residences on the brink of physical collapse. Within the scope of contemporary fiction, architecture, and poetics of space, the country house—with its uniquely integrating and exceptionally evocative qualities—accentuates different conceptions of dwelling. Consequently, literary portrayals of the country house can be seen as both prefiguring and reflecting the contemporary practice of living.

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Across the whole of modern Czech history from 1918, through World War II, and into the postwar years ethnic and minority issues have been of the utmost prominence. Moreover, Czechoslovakia has in the past been held up as a model for solving problems related to ethnic and minority tensions through legal regulations regulations that played a key role in delineating minority status. Primarily intended for an international, non-Czech audience, this book takes a long-term perspective on issues related to ethnic and language minorities in Czechoslovakia. Bridging legal and historical disciplines, Jan Kukl k and Rene Petra show that as ethnic minority issues once again come to the forefront of policy debates in Europe and beyond, a detailed knowledge of earlier Czech difficulties and solutions may help us to understand and remedy contemporary problems.

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The design of Prague's gardens and parks especially the green spaces of its palaces, castles, and monastery complexes, both private and public is inseparable from the millennium-long efflorescence of this exquisite Czech metropolis. Lushly illustrated with nearly one hundred and fifty original color photographs and archival images, Prague: Parks and Gardens not only shares the latest findings on these gardens' historical foundation and stylistic transformations, but also takes us through the garden gates into individual gardens and parks both Prague's most visited and its undiscovered green gems. Meandering past flower-framed baroque statues to renaissance loggias, romantic pavilions, elegant stairways, and bubbling fountains, the book explores Prague's gardens and parks by locality, offering novel insight into the city's different sections that will delight all educated travelers and lovers of Prague. For gardeners, descriptions of some historical gardens also include explanations of their specific spatial relations, connecting them to the larger story of European urban garden design. Complemented with a glossary of terms and an index of important figures and locations, this beautiful celebration of Prague's remarkable living botanical art, both past and present, sheds new light on the leafy corners of this adored European capital.

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Inferences with Ignorance focuses on two formal logic systems that employ the type of inferences in which questions are used in addition to statements. Not merely capturing questions as part of a logical apparatus, Michal Pelis also emphasizes the role of question-asking in communication. The book presents options for formalizing questions using sets of "direct answers," demonstrates where questions are used in inferences, and explores asking questions and seeking answers as important components of everyday communication, proposing ways of using questions within a formal system that can capture a change in knowledge during this simple communication.

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The Royal Tombs of Ur, dating from approximately 3000–2700 BCE, are among the most famous and impressive archeological discoveries of the twentieth century. Excavated between 1922 and 1934 under the direction of Leonard Woolley, this site is one of the richest sources of information we have about ancient Sumer—however, many mysteries about the society that produced these tombs remain. Based on primary research with the Ur materials at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, and paying particular attention to the iconography found in what Woolley referred to as the “Seal Impression Strata of Ur,” this book works to reconstruct the early history of Sumer. What was this society like? What social structures did this society build? What were its institutions of authority? The answers Petr Charvát proposes are of interest not only to archeologists, but to anyone fascinated by early human history.

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The legal system of the present-day Czech Republic cannot be understood without sufficient knowledge of its historical roots and evolution. Kuklik traces the development of Czech law from its origins as a form of Slavic law to its current position, reflecting the influence of both Roman law and the legal systems of neighboring countries. The twentieth century is of particular importance due to the establishment of an independent Czechoslovakia in 1918 and its split in 1993 into the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. It was a century encompassing periods of democratic as well as totalitarian regimes, and major political, ideological, economic, and social changes, making Czech Law in Historical Context an ideal case study for researchers interested in the transition of democratic legal systems into totalitarian regimes, and vice versa.

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Interviews twelve experts on oral history to discuss the medium's status within the social sciences in light of recent technological breakthroughs. This title addresses many of the challenges of oral history, from its inherent subjectivity to whether it should be treated as a discipline or simply a method for research.

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In 2005 the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic granted to the Charles University Law Faculty funds to research developments in Czech law from the last twenty years. Their findings were compiled into a four-volume collection entitled "New Phenomena in Law at the Beginning of the 21st Century". In "Czech Law Between Europeanization and Globalization", editor Michal Tomasek features those selections from the original monograph that are most relevant to an international audience. Translated into English, the texts in this collection are divided into four sections: Historical Impulses for the Development of Law, Theoretical and Constitutional Impulses for the Development of Law, Transformation of Public Law, and Transformation of Private Law. Accompanying each section are extensive bibliographies to help those unfamiliar with the Czech legal system. A major contribution from many of the leading Czech legal scholars, "Czech Law Between Europeanization and Globalization" provides necessary background for all who study comparative, European, and international law.

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A new look at the development of innovative postwar writing in France, Britain, and the United States. The Avant-Postman explores a broad range of innovative postwar writing from France, Britain, and the United States. Taking James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as a joint starting point, David Vichnar draws genealogical lines from there through the work of more than fifty writers up to very recent years, including William Burroughs, B. S. Johnson, Ian Sinclair, Kathy Acker, Alan Moore, David Foster Wallace, and many others. Centering the exploration around five strategies employed by Joyce—narrative parallax, stylistic metempsychosis, concrete writing, forgery, and neologizing the logos—the book reveals the striking continuities and developments from Joyce’s day to our own.

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Described by Parul Sehgal in the New York Times Book Review as one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century; the scourge of state censors; the gregarious bar hound and lover of gossip, beer, cats, and women (in roughly that order), Bohumil Hrabal is one of the most important, most translated, and most idiosyncratic Czech authors. In Bohumil Hrabal: A Full-Length Portrait, Jiri Pelan makes the case that this praise is far too narrow. A respected scholar of French and Italian literature, Pelan approaches Hrabal as a comparatist, expertly situating him within the context of European and world literature as he explores the entirety of Hrabal's oeuvre and its development over sixty years. Concise, clear, and as compulsively readable as the works of Hrabal himself, Bohumil Hrabal was universally praised by critics in its original Czech edition as one of best works of Hrabal criticism. Here it is beautifully rendered into English for the first time by David Short, a celebrated tra

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Since the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989, Prague has become one of Europe’s—and the world’s—most popular tourist destinations. As in London, Paris, and Rome, visitors flock to the gorgeous buildings and monuments that grace the streets of Prague, entranced by structures ranging from Gothic and baroque to cubist and neoclassical. And while hundreds of thousands stroll over Charles Bridge and gaze up at St. Vitus Cathedral each year, far fewer venture away from the crowds to seek out the countless gems of art nouveau peppered throughout Prague. With Art Nouveau Prague, Petr Wittlich—one of Europe’s leading experts on nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture—tours those monuments and buildings of Prague that are most representative of the art nouveau movement while offering insightful commentary on each. Along the way, Wittlich visits such sites as the Municipal House, the Wilson Railway Station, the Grand Hotel Europa, and works by sculptors František Bílek, Ladislav Šaloun, and Stanislav Sucharda. An introductory essay by Wittlich emphasizing the role of art nouveau within contemporary currents of modern European art accompanies more than one hundred color illustrations of some of the most stunning examples of art nouveau architecture and decoration in existence, and a detailed bibliography provides additional reading for each of the sites displayed in the book. Art Nouveau Prague is a must-have for those traveling to Prague for the first time or for anyone who appreciates or wants to learn more about art nouveau style.

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An original study of radio propaganda in Czechoslovakia. Between 1939 and 1945, Czechoslovakia disappeared from the maps, existing only as an imagined ‘free republic’ on the radio waves. Following the German invasion and annexation of Bohemia and Moravia and the declaration of independence by Slovakia on 15 March 1939, the Czechoslovak Republic was gone. From their position in exile in wartime London, former Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš and the government that formed around him depended on radio to communicate with the public they strove to represent. The broadcasts made by government figures in London enabled a performance of authority to impress their hosts, allies, occupying enemies, and claimed constituents. This book examines this government program for the first time, making use of previously unstudied archival sources to examine how the exiles understood their mission and how their propaganda work was shaped by both British and Soviet influences. This study assesses the strengths, weaknesses, and limitations of the government’s radio propaganda as they navigated the complexities of exile, with chapters examining how they used the radio to establish their authority, how they understood the past and future of the Czechoslovak nation, and how they struggled to include Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia within it.

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An analysis of “nudging” as a tool for influencing human health behavior. Behavioral economics sees “nudges” as ways to encourage people to re-evaluate their priorities in such a way that they voluntarily change their behavior, leading to personal and social benefits. This book examines nudging as a tool for influencing human behavior in health policy. The authors investigate the contemporary scientific discourse on nudging and enrich it with an ontological, epistemological, and praxeological analysis of human behavior. Based on analyses of the literature and a systemic review, the book defines nudging tools within the paradigm of prospect theory. In addition to the theoretical contribution, Nudging also examines and offers suggestions on the practice of health policy regarding obesity, malnutrition, and especially type 2 diabetes mellitus.

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An archeological history of the indigenous cultures of the Carpathian Basin.Baden, Kostolac, Vucedol and Vinkovci uses archaeology and genetics to create a novel cultural and historical interpretation of the Carpathian Basin during the Late Eneolithic period. The author traces the linear development of indigenous cultures from the Baden Culture through the Kostolac Culture to the Vucedol Culture, before positing that certain qualitative and quantitative shifts were driven by the entry of foreign populations—the Pit Grave Culture and the Bell Beaker Culture—into the Carpathian Basin. The book also analyzes the emergence of the Early Bronze Age, establishing an absolute chronology, and examines the Vucedol Culture’s influence on geographically distant Bronze Age groups. An appendix also includes a discussion of findings that, while outside the Carpathian Basin, are part of its cultural sphere.

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Traces the history of visual representations of anti-Jewish hatred in Czech Bohemia. The vicious scourges of religion-based anti-Judaism and ethnically-rooted anti-Semitism are tragically deep-seated aspects of Czech Bohemian history. Images of Malice—copublished with Artefactum—examines visual instances from the well-known low points of historic Bohemian anti-Semitic resentment, while also recasting common views of eras not typically associated with rises in virulent anti-Jewish sentiment. This mapping of the visual signs of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism is also an account of their broader meaning, as the processes of stereotyping, delegitimization, dehumanization, and exclusion from society represent a more dire and universal problem. As Images of Malice makes bracingly clear, the danger of anti-Jewish visuals is still an urgent problem today, in Europe and beyond.

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These new editions of the first universal textbooks for studying Czech as a foreign language employ a strictly communication-based format that requires no mediating language and thus is ideal for users of all mother tongues. Fresh and modern in their approach, these books systematically develop all language skills—reading, speaking, listening, and writing—using engaging illustrations and texts that emphasize the natural dialogical character of the language as used in everyday speech. Jitka Cvejnová’s extensive experience teaching intensive, immersive classes and introducing foreign learners to the Czech world through language also enables her to enrich the books with valuable sociocultural context. Consequently the only Czech language textbooks based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages levels, they are ideal for use in both short-term and long-term courses. Česky, prosím I is intended for young adult and adult beginners. Including both a textbook and a workbook, its content meets the demands of level A1.

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