Katarina Gephardt – författare

Literatures of small nations represent a minuscule portion of the global literary marketplace, where books written in English outnumber translated works. The struggle for visibility in relation to dominant languages and cultures is not new in Slovakia, a nation of five million whose literary history has been shaped by the influence of more widely spoken languages including Hungarian, Czech, and Russian.Home and the World in Slovak Writing brings Slovak literature out of this isolation to tell the story of how a nation's literature can survive and thrive despite a small domestic audience and relatively limited circulation in English translation. The book demonstrates how historic events such as the post-Stalin Thaw, the Prague Spring, and the Velvet Revolution moulded the Slovak canon and situates contemporary Slovak literature in broader regional and global contexts. Through case studies of the transformations and adaptations of Slovak literature, contributors examine the changing social roles of writers, the tensions between tradition and innovation, and the dynamic interactions between influences from the outside world and domestic sources of inspiration.Home and the World in Slovak Writing maps the relationship between geopolitical destiny and literary production at a critical moment. As relations between the East and the West are destabilized by war, the question of cultural identity has again become a matter of national survival in Central Europe.

The nineteenth century was the heyday of travel, with Britons continually reassessing their own culture in relation to not only the colonized but also other Europeans, especially the ones that they encountered on the southern and eastern peripheries of the continent. Offering illustrative case studies, Katarina Gephardt shows how specific rhetorical strategies used in contemporary travel writing produced popular fictional representations of continental Europe in the works of Ann Radcliffe, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, and Bram Stoker. She examines a wide range of autobiographical and fictional travel narratives to demonstrate that the imaginative geographies underpinning British ideas of Europe emerged from the spaces between fact and fiction. Adding texture to her study are her analyses of the visual dimensions of cross-cultural representation and of the role of evolving technologies in defining a shared set of rhetorical strategies. Gephardt argues that British writers envisioned their country simultaneously as distinct from the Continent and as a part of Europe, anticipating the contradictory British discourse around European integration that involves both fear that the European super-state will violate British sovereignty and a desire to play a more central role in the European Union.