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Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century : A Surrealist History

Pages 13-32, 61-66, 233-4, 241-3, 374-87, and 407-19 overlap with my 2013 article on André Breton. However: (1) the level of detail and depth of analysis of the same events and themes in the book move well beyond the article; (2) the subject-matter of the article forms one small strand in the broad canvas of Czech cultural history presented in this book; (3) the book develops a wider analysis of Prague as "capital of the twentieth century" in the spirit of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, in which surrealism has played a central theoretical role as "the unconscious of the epoch”.

This is a very large monograph (620 pages), the second book in a trilogy of works dealing with Czech history, whose first volume was The Coasts of Bohemia (1998). It is the product of ten years' research. The source base, of which the primary materials are mostly in Czech or French, is huge—the bibliography runs to 30 pages. The thesis is both extensive (this is the fullest account of the interwar Czech avant-garde in English) and complex (the book makes a wider theoretical argument for Prague as a vantage point from which to rethink standard western conceptions of "modernity").