BeyondtheWorldofMen Format: Paperback

An inclusive collection of modern Czech short fiction that features overlooked women writers.

Bringing together Czech fiction published by women between 1890 and 1910, Beyond the World of Men presents works that confront pivotal issues of the time, including the “woman question” and women’s rights, class conflict, lesbian love, and the relationship between the aristocracy and the Czech peasantry (as in two stories originally written in German by the aristocrat Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach). The collection contains stories that are of literary merit, but also hold historical value. In these works, the authors offer trenchant social commentary while injecting both comic and sentimental elements into their writing, employing humanity and subtlety.

As a whole, the collection suggests a revision of the critical understanding of Czech literary modernism; these writers represent voices that were not usually heard in the male writing of the period. They also demand evaluation in their differing (but constant) reactions to earlier women’s writing in Czech and in other European languages, but particularly that of the central figure of Božena Nemcová, to whose canonic novel Babicka they constantly return.

Geoffrey Chew is emeritus professor of music at Royal Holloway, University of London and has previously taught at the University of Aberdeen and the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, as well as the Institute of Musicology at Masaryk University in Brno. As a translator of Czech literature, he has published two selections of short stories, And My Head Exploded: Tales of Desire, Delirium and Decadence from Fin-de-Siècle Prague and Beyond the World of Men: Women’s Fiction at the Czech Fin de Siècle, as well as Karel Hynek Mácha’s Gypsies.