Lenka Řezníková
Melancholic souls: social dysfunction and social phobias in Czech literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries
This paper deals with the presentation of social dysfunctions in 1890s Czech Decadent literature. At a time when other trends in Czech literature were highlighting mass society and crowd behaviour as a topos, neo-Romantic, Decadent and Symbolist literature was now reflecting extreme forms of individualism. The staging of pathological anxieties here became part of a broad contemporary debate over the relationship between individualism and a modernising, consumerist, conformist and manipulable society, which was also the subject of contemporary psychology under various headings during and especially at the end of the 19th century. Pathological individualism was not presented in neo-Romantic, Decadent and Symbolist literature either as something we are obliged to choose, or as a goal of emancipatory endeavours, but as a condition to which some individuals are "condemned" as a result of specific and entirely uncontrollable factors.
Keywords: individualism – Czech literature – literary modernism – fin de siecle – Decadence – melancholy – Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic
design by Bedřich Vémola
