Dobrota Pucherová – författare

This book re-reads the last 60 years of Anglophone African women’s writing from a transnational and trans-historical feminist perspective, rather than postcolonial, from which these texts have been traditionally interpreted. Such a comparative frame throws into relief patterns across time and space that make it possible to situate this writing as an integral part of women’s literary history.Revisiting this literature in a comparative context with Western women writers since the 18th century, the author highlights how invocations of "tradition" have been used by patriarchy everywhere to subjugate women, the similarities between women’s struggles worldwide, and the feminist imagination it produced. The author argues that in the 21st century, African feminism has undergone a major epistemic shift: from a culturally exclusive to a relational feminism that conceptualizes African femininity through the risky opening of oneself to otherness, transculturation, and translation. Like Western feminists in the 1960s, contemporary African women writers are turning their attention to the female body as the prime site of women’s oppression and freedom, reframing feminism as a demand for universal human rights and actively shaping global discourses on gender, modernity, and democracy.The book will be of interest to students and researchers of African literature, but also feminist literary scholars and comparatists more generally.

This book re-reads the last 60 years of Anglophone African women’s writing from a transnational and trans-historical feminist perspective, rather than postcolonial, from which these texts have been traditionally interpreted. Such a comparative frame throws into relief patterns across time and space that make it possible to situate this writing as an integral part of women’s literary history.Revisiting this literature in a comparative context with Western women writers since the 18th century, the author highlights how invocations of "tradition" have been used by patriarchy everywhere to subjugate women, the similarities between women’s struggles worldwide, and the feminist imagination it produced. The author argues that in the 21st century, African feminism has undergone a major epistemic shift: from a culturally exclusive to a relational feminism that conceptualizes African femininity through the risky opening of oneself to otherness, transculturation, and translation. Like Western feminists in the 1960s, contemporary African women writers are turning their attention to the female body as the prime site of women’s oppression and freedom, reframing feminism as a demand for universal human rights and actively shaping global discourses on gender, modernity, and democracy.The book will be of interest to students and researchers of African literature, but also feminist literary scholars and comparatists more generally.

This volume marks the first translation into another language of the first Slovak novel, René, or: A Young Man’s Adventures and Experiences, published in 1783-1785. Written at a time when the Slovaks lived under the double domination of the Hungarian Kingdom and the Habsburg Monarchy, the story, and accompanying commentary, shed light on the variations of the Enlightenment Bildungsroman in minor European languages.René and his companion are curious anthropologists studying the cultures of various societies. Their interrogation of social custom, class system, religious practice and ecclesiastical authority reflects Bajza’s belief in the power of critical examination to better the world. Their journeys from Venice to the Middle East, Austria and Upper Hungary measure the distance between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarity’ and allow the author to deliver stinging criticism of his own society.The novel’s familiar landscape, echoing Voltaire, Montesquieu, Wieland or Johnson, place it among the classics of the Age of Enlightenment. At the same time, the book documents the particular challenges faced by the Central European Enlightenment intellectuals, opening a window into the process of self-definition of the smaller European nations. The introduction and concluding studies explore the specificities of Catholic Enlightenment in the work of Bajza (c.1754–1836) and his Hungarian contemporary György Bessenyei (1747–1811), as seen in their preoccupation with ideal governance, religion, vernacular languages and education, as well as the themes of travel, orientalism, scientific knowledge, the rational subject and individual freedom.Translated by David Short, a prize-winning translator from Czech and Slovak with a career of over 50 years. From 1973 to 2011 he taught at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University of London. His translations include works by such writers as Bohumil Hrabal, Karel Čapek and Vítězslav Nezval, as well as academic works in the fields of art, literature, linguistics and semantics.