Sunītā Jain´s short stories discussed in this article deal with the life of Indians in the United States. Usually the question is raised as to what a particular character has gained and lost in the new environment. The writer´s attention focuses on the experiences and feelings of the characters, on their perception of the environment, not on the environment itself. In a way, she warns her readers,: the independence and individuality that many of her characters have won are similar to loneliness.
The article presents an analysis of two short stories by Shen Congwen (1902-1988), the foremost Chinese writer of the Republican period (1912-1949). The peculiar anti-idyllic quality of "Aboard and on Shore", a local-mood prose piece with marked autobiographical coloring, and "Sansan", an early example of the writer´s famous pastoral stories, is scrutinized using M. Bakhtin´s concept of "chronotop". Examination of the stories´ spatio-temporal layout reveals the presence of a shared semantic structure: the rise and subsequent demise of an idyllic space. The unstable chronology, a quality inherent not only to the two pieces under scruting but also to a series of Shen Congwen´s work from the late 1920s and early 1930s, is discussed as being possibly a product of the writer´s effort to express nostalgia.
This study examines changes in narrative approaches in Czech, Moravian and (German-written) Silesian belles lettres from 1770-1790. In its examination of historical poetics and changes in narrative methods, it draws on the structuralist studies of Lubomír Doležal (his "narrative text transformation" model) and Daniela Hodrová (fictive novel vs. reality novel). Instead of the idea that prose evolves in relation to a fixed "linguistic substrate" in an immanent, autonomous way, the author inclines to the notion of a plurality of poetic codes on various linguistic levels (from stylistic registers, "narrative methods" and narrative structures to individual genres and the comprehensive aesthetic that shapes entire epochs). The study starts with an outline the socio-historical background to the emergence of literary periodicals in the Czech Lands in the early 1770s and their authors’ publishing strategies. It then considers the transformational impact these periodicals had on the literary prose of the day. The third part examines how the belles lettres of literary periodicals reacted to impulses from Enlightenment poetics such as the sentimentalism of Laurence Sterne and the Sturm und Drang movement, with illustrative interpretations of the novellas Der Philosoph in der Suppe (The Philosopher in the Soup) by Johann Ferdinand Opitz, Die neue Sapfo (The New Sappho) by Christian Heinrich Spiess and Der sonderbare Kupler (The Peculiar Pimp) by Josef Herbst and Josef Kirpal., Václav Smyčka., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy