The article is an attempt to consider the common points in the prose of Polish and Czech female writers. It does not constitute a closed story being presented in a categorical tone of recognitions based off of the summary of a given oeuvre’s stage. It is rather a reflexion resulting from stipulations, probability, possible time points of contact and overlapping of these themes that are mainly oscillating around the recovery of one’s own voice as well as privacy and intimacy. As the result, these reflections can be treated as an attempt at pointing out a community of experiences characteristic for a given sex, which rejects the dominating discourse and which focuses on individual experience that is oftentimes difficult to express and is exposed to embarrassment and isolation. The Polish and Czech female writers presented in the narrative of this text are speaking with their own voices and moreover they are speaking for other women as well, having noticed the public and political dimension of privacy and intimacy.

The main purpose of the paper is to present and discuss issues related to crossing controversial and provocative cultural boundaries with regard to the taboo pertaining to eroticism along with non-prudish sexuality, corporality, rape and domestic violence. This problem is illustrated by the works of the leading Czech female writers such as: Jakuba Katalpa, Petra Hůlová and Radka Denemarková. The analyses and interpretations of the works are complemented by the reactions of Czech critics, which are often very agitated. The topic of the article relates not only to the talented Czech female writers, but also draws attention to the phenomenon of “writing done by women” standing in opposition to “women’s literature”.

The aim of this article is a comparative analysis of the works of two important Central European female writers: Radka Denemarková and Olga Tokarczuk; with a particular focus on their most recent novels: Hodiny z olova (2018) and Empuzjon. Horror przyrodoleczniczy (2022). The introduction juxtaposes literary agendas and goals that the both authors set for their novels as well as extra-literary ways of communicating with the readers. Introduction is followed by an analysis of the formal characteristics of their novels, which escape genre explicitness. The plot construction of the works corresponds with the subject matter, and has the character of a diagnosis that opens up a discussion on the condition of contemporary societies: Czech, Polish, European and even Chinese. In Hodiny z olova, Denemarková juxtaposes contemporary Beijing and Prague, asks about values and human rights in (post)totalitarian societies. Tokarczuk, on the other hand, uses the metaphor of tuberculosis to ask about other human ailments related to identity and co-existence with the natural world.

Both in the Polish as well as in the Czech literature after 1989, the number of family narrative increases, which – according to many researchers – might be successfully used to observe social transformations. This article undertakes such attempt in regard to two novels – Szopka [Farce] by Zośka Papużanka and Pod śniegiem [Under the Snow] by Petra Soukupová. They are analysed (plot- and language-wise) from the comparative perspective, moreover – in accordance with the opinions of Agnieszka Mrozik, Anna Pekaniec and Eva Klíčová – they are treated as a document pertaining to Polish and Czech realities as well as the difference in both nations’ mentalities. Described were also a different methods, by which both texts deconstruct myth of happy family as well as represent a broader sociocultural phenomena – the Polish Romantic tradition and the Czech escape from the public into a private sphere.

The article is an attempt to look at the situation of mine workers’ wives, widows and daughters in Zagłębie Ostrawsko-Karwińskie, currently belonging to the Czech Republic. The topos of the male mine worker was founded on the stereotype of the traditional proletarian masculinity not only in the Polish People’s Republic but also in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic; the mine workers were presented as the icons of the success propaganda. After 1989 a polemic with this view was undertaken by the theatre in the Czech Republic and in the last decade the literature, written mostly by women (Kamila Hladká, Karin Lednická), has done so as well. Until now, the writers and researchers have concentrated on the hard work of the fathers in the mine worker families, which has resulted in an impression that the women were only the passive spectators of all the dramatic changes happening in the hard coal mining industry. Thanks to adapting the feminist perspective, it is possible to get to know a traditional Silesian mine worker family depicted differently than before.

The article showcases preliminary remarks and questions about the relation between scientific and religious worldview in Leopold Staff ’s poetry on the example of the astral symbolics appearing in it. It presents the question of the evolution of this author’s scientific language in connection with the transformation of the Interwar poets’ imagination under the influence of astrophysical knowledge gained as a result of important discoveries and cosmic observations. This attempt is an invitation to take a look at the history of the Polish poetry in the 20th century from the perspective of its transformations in connection to scientific, and especially, astrophysical progress. Staff ’s poetry dating from the Young Poland period to the post-World War II time seems to be a good lens, through which such transformations can be observed.

The aim of the article is to consider an issue of a split between the psychologism which dominates Knut Hamsun’s novel and the harrowing experience of an exhausted body echoing in the narration. The argumentation is based on a polemic with researchers interpreting Hamsun’s work in terms of a modernist urban novel, thereby treating titular hunger purely as a theme of the text, not as a traumatic, somatic experience structuring the entire narration. Focusing on issues often overlooked during cursory readings, brings out the innovative meanings and narrative techniques pioneering later literary turns.