Portraying Countryside in Central European Literature

The website is dedicated to the project „Portraying Countryside in Central European Literature“ supported by Visegrad Fund (www.visegradfund.org; www.visegrad.fund, fb: www.facebook.com/visegradfund) and led by the University of Ostrava (Faculty of Arts) in cooperation with the Slovak Academy of Sciences (Institute of Slovak Literature, www.uslit.sav.sk) and Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest (Faculty of Humanities, szlav.elte.hu.

The scientific objective of the project is to research rural images in Central European literature. We wish to follow the depiction of space, but we also ask questions about the importance of the theme for individual national literatures in various periods, including the present. How did literature capture the countryside and how does it reflect the transformations of the countryside in the modern world? Is the situation in Central Europe somehow significant? What will the comparison of rural concepts in the Czech, Slovak, Hungarian and other environment disclose?

The so-called spatial studies have been developed at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ostrava for a long time. Since 2010 we have been organizing spatial symposia and subsequently, we have published representative publications (3 up to now: Town, Landscape and Nature vs. Industrial), in which researchers from the Czech Republic and on a smaller scale from  abroad participated (see ff.osu.cz/kcl/12510/prostorova-sympozia).

Now we will develop this in the forthcoming symposium on the theme of rural areas more internationally to come to a comparison that has not yet been made. An important practical goal of the project is therefore to establish closer cooperation with research institutions in the V4 countries in an active way, but also to engage postgraduate students in these activities (a workshop for students will be held in Bratislava in September 2020). Selected PhD students will subsequently participate at the scientific symposium which will take place in Budapest in November 2020. The main participants of the symposium will be invited researchers from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland etc. Their contributions will be elaborated as chapters of the upcoming book entitled „Countryside: Representation of rural space in literature“. So, the students will have the opportunity to present their work to foreign colleagues and be inspired by their (possibly different) approaches.

Symposium “Portraying Countryside in Central European Literature”

facebook.com/portraying.countryside.V4

Workshop „Venkov a jeho reprezentace v literaturách střední Evropy“

The project is co-financed by the Governments of Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants from International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.

Zveřejněno / aktualizováno: 04. 03. 2021