Kapitoly z francouzské, italské a české literatury

The first of the three sections focuses on works devoted to French literature. Following an essay on the development of the Holy Grail motif in French medieval Arthurian literature, it contains essays on Raymond Queneau and Samuel Beckett, two personalities, who made an impact on thematic choices and narrative methods of modern fiction. The second section centres on essays on Italian literature. The first essay in this section focuses on the most important figure of the period of Romanticism – Giacomo Leopardi; the following essay considers the applicability of "Biedermeier" on Italian material; the last two essays analyze the Italian path to the avant-garde modernism using the example of the Crepuscular poets and Marinettian futurism. The third section contains comparative works, covering especially Italian-Czech and French-Czech literary relations (Francesco Petrarch's reception, the "marinism" in the Czech baroque poetry, Arthur Breisky's dandyist aesthetics), works devoted to Czech authors (Bohumil Hrabal, Vladimír Holan) and contributions to the history of Czech translation. In the last section, the author places essays focusing on important figures of modern literary science (Leo Spitzer, Tzvetan Todorov, Claudio Magris).