Czech literature: The Nineteenth Century

Pan-Slavism and romanticism dominated Czech literature in the first half of the 19th cent. František Palacký highlighted Slavic scholarship. The 9th- and 13th-century Slavic texts produced by Václav Hanka (1791–1861) were proved spurious; they became, however, part of the Czech literary tradition and remained influential. In the later 19th cent., when the poetry of Svatopluk Čech, Jan Neruda, and Joseph V. Sládek and the novels of Alois Jirásek achieved fame, literature was oriented toward the intellectual and the bourgeois.

Sections in this article:

• Introduction
• Modern Czech Literature
• The Nineteenth Century
• Early Literature
• Bibliography

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