On This Modern Highway, Lost in the Jungle

Tropics, Travel, and Colonialism in Czech Poetry

Jan Mrázek author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Karolinum,Nakladatelstvi Univerzity Karlovy,Czech Republic

Published:2nd Nov '22

Should be back in stock very soon

On This Modern Highway, Lost in the Jungle cover

Postcolonial reflections on Indonesia’s influence upon the avant-garde poetry of a non-colonial European.

In 1926, the Communist avant-garde poet Konstantin Biebl (1898–1951) traveled from Czechoslovakia to the Dutch East Indies. In the writings from his journal—texts simultaneously poetic and comic—both landlocked Bohemia and the colonized tropical islands are seen in disorienting new perspectives, like “mirrors looking at themselves in each other.”

Jan Mrázek’s On This Modern Highway, Lost in the Jungle takes us on a journey of our own, crisscrossing Biebl’s life and work—with particular attention to his travel writing—as they mirror Mrázek’s own experiences as a multinational academic: a Prague conservatory graduate, educated at Michigan and Cornell, and now a scholar of Indonesia living in Singapore. Biebl’s writings are also the book’s point of departure for a broader exploration of the intersections of travel and poetry, issues of colonial and social injustice, and the representation of otherness in the Czech literary and visual imagination. In its attention to how poetic travel reflects the Czech historical experience in the shadow of imperial nations, Mrázek’s book elevates scholarly reflection on literary travel, modernity, and colonialism to a new level.

"In the first part of the book, Mrázek (Southeast Asian studies, National Univ. of Singapore) provides an extensive biography of Biebl; the second part focuses on the poet’s imagery and the striking graphic aspects of his texts. The audience for this book will be those interested in Czech literature and in the interwar European avant-garde in general." * Choice *
"Honest, precise, personal yet objective, and obviously well researched."  * Michala Tomanová and Michaela Budiman, Charles University *

ISBN: 9788024651125

Dimensions: 235mm x 165mm x 23mm

Weight: unknown

324 pages