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The Municipal Baths
Železná, Jana ; Beran, Zdeněk (referee) ; Sochor, Jan (advisor)
This thesis project is describing a new object of municipal baths in a specific urban environment. It is a building of social and recreational character. The primary content is therefore not a sports pool with lanes, but pools and areas intended for relaxation. The building contains an entrance area, changing rooms, swimming pools, rest areas and service rooms. It also includes saunas, massage rooms, café and ancillary premises.
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Music in Anthony Burgess' fiction
Kiszová, Tereza ; Beran, Zdeněk (advisor) ; Poncarová, Petra Johana (referee)
THESIS ABSTRACT Literature has been considered an ideal model for literature since Romanticism, however, some of the 20th -century authors have employed the analogy more precisely than the Romantics. Being a classical composer as well as an author of fiction, Anthony Burgess represents the perfect example of how the two arts influence each other. Music pervades a large portion of the author's prolific literary work, occurring in various forms. This thesis examines allusions to music, which offer insight into the psychology of characters in some texts and elucidates the context in others, as well as on the structural features of Burgess' works. Well acquainted with the technique of composing music, Burgess models some of his works on musical forms, or specific compositions and thus adds another layer to the connection between music and literature. Both of the aforementioned methods will be discussed first separately and then combined in a single novel. Burgess' short story "1889 and the Devil's Mode" (1989) will illustrate the use of music on a thematic level, the structural analogies to music will be examined in Burgess' experimental novel Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (1974) and finally, the interplay of both methods will be discussed in Burgess' most-recognized novel A Clockwork Orange...
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Victorian feminism: Oppressive notions mediated in selected poetry of Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Hochmanová, Ester ; Beran, Zdeněk (advisor) ; Horová, Miroslava (referee)
Victorian Feminism: Oppressive Notions Mediated in Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning's "Aurora Leigh" Ester Hochmanová Abstract Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, two prominent poets of the Victorian Era, notably discuss various notions oppressive to women in their poetry, namely "Goblin Market" and "Aurora Leigh." Employing the Victorian theme of glamorizing death, Barrett-Browning speaks on the deadly protentional of normalizing such restrictive entrapping and an idea that love and sexual relations are often embedded in power disproportion. Rossetti on the other hand, focuses on chastity which is strongly implemented by the Catholic Church and deems unchaste women "fallen," while men are not being held up to the same standard. This overall critical examination of traditional gender roles, motherhood, and marriage, emphasizes the intersection of societal expectations, trauma, and autonomy in the lives of Victorian women. The goblin's tempting fruit becomes an allegory unveiling the predatory dynamics prevalent in Victorian society, while the narrative simultaneously unfolds a nuanced exploration of sisterhood and homoerotic, the constraints of societal expectations, and the dichotomy of fallen and redeemed women. The periodical concept of the "Angel in the...
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Christian Ethics and the Victorian Novel: The Child as a Christ Figure in Oliver Twist, Silas Marner, and The Master-Christian
Vítek, Jaroslav ; Beran, Zdeněk (advisor) ; Horová, Miroslava (referee)
This diploma thesis contributes to the evolving field of religious/postsecular and ethical studies. In the first chapter, I position my thesis in the context of the religious and ethical turn of the humanities and narrow the scope of my focus to the Victorian novel, whose critical accounts were frequently misconstrued due to the application of the secularisation thesis. I then focus on the transposition of Christianity and its ethical functions from institutional affiliations to Victorian literature and literary criticism. I interpret an orphaned child as a Christ figure in three Victorian novels, whose selection illustrates the progress of the transposition from the early Victorian period to the end of the 19th century. I establish an interpretative frame, which I apply to the following analyses of the orphan character in Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1837- 1838), George Eliot's Silas Marner (1861), and Marie Corelli's The Master-Christian (1900). In the second chapter, I interpret the eponymous character of Oliver Twist as the Christ figure, who brings the possibility of redemption and salvation from the ineffectual government institutions and London underground. Furthermore, Oliver establishes a heavenly kingdom on earth represented as a pastoral idyll at the end of the novel. I also focus on...
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From Ghostly Hooves to Phantom Voices: Sound as a Source of Anxiety in Selected British Ghost Stories
Fialová, Jana ; Poncarová, Petra Johana (advisor) ; Beran, Zdeněk (referee)
The thesis discusses the use of sound as a means of inducing anxiety in four selected British ghost stories that were published either during or closely after the Victorian period. Each story was analyzed focusing on the kinds of sounds the author employs, the nature and cause of the haunting, the response of the characters, also with the references to the historical background and context. The primary texts were selected according to the diverse types of sounds that the authors use in them. The first chapter deals with "The Open Door" (1881) by Margaret Oliphant in which she employs a weeping child ghost looking for his mother, that haunts another child and his family. The following chapter comments on William Hope Hodgson's "The Horse of the Invisible" (1910) where an allegedly cursed family is haunted by the sounds of an evil horse galloping and neighing. The story, which is part of the series which features the occult investigator Thomas Carnacki, combines detective and ghost story elements. The third chapter analyses "The Mass for the Dead" (1893) by Edit Nesbit, which follows a couple being haunted by choral music, told from the point of view of one of the lovers. The fourth chapter reflects on "A Wicked Voice" (1890) by Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), in which the main character, an opera...
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"And Seek for Truth in the Garden of Academus": British Campus Novel in the 20th Century
Pomazova, Yekaterina ; Beran, Zdeněk (advisor) ; Horová, Miroslava (referee)
There is nothing so suspenseful as an academic committee. - Charles Percy Snow The campus or academic novel is an undeservedly forgotten literary genre that is believed to have its origins in the Anglo-American world in the early 1950s. Ironically enough, there is a lack of due attention to the genre even in many of the English literature-focused programmes, while the ambience, the characterization and the plot of academic novels are directly interrelated with university life. The bachelor's thesis would focus particularly on the British campus novel and its features, attempting to understand the essential characteristics of a classic academic novel. The earliest the thesis will focus on is The Masters by Charles Percy Snow, a rather ambiguous representative of the genre, written in 1951. Even though, some scholars do not consider this work an academic novel, the majority of critics agree that the novel belongs to the era of ivory towers of the campus novel genre. The campus novel, as we know it today, is not just a matter of setting; it is a very complex term that includes satire, irony and critique of academia. The Masters portrays rather a solemn and elegiac university life, which may seem bland and simple at first but in reality, it is a multi-layered writing that is not afraid of bringing up...
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Violence, guilt and war in Ian McEwan's selected novels
Makovcová, Monika ; Beran, Zdeněk (advisor) ; Poncarová, Petra Johana (referee)
THESIS ABSTRACT Ian McEwan belongs to one of the prominent contemporary British authors. His work offers a wide range of unsettling themes, social and political commentary but also a remarkable literary experience. McEwan gains the attention of readers across the globe, making him an important international author as well. The success of his unsettling novels is a result of collective societal fascination with trauma, which is a phenomenon deserving attention in itself. This thesis focuses on three novels written within one decade, in the period when McEwan's work was highly academically acclaimed. These novels are Enduring Love (1997), Atonement (2001), and Saturday (2005). Attention is paid to the reappearing themes of violence, guilt, war and literature and their particular role in the narrative. While violence, guilt, and war are themes explicitly present in the novels, their function on the metaphorical, symbolic and implicit level is far more significant and offers a brand new level of understanding of McEwan's ideas and way of thinking about given issues. Additionally, literature is treated as a separate subject as it is precisely literature itself that McEwan comments on, through his complex narrative strategies. This thesis thus focuses also on these strategies, usage of the mentioned themes, and...
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The question of social and class relationships in the British social-problem novel
Miczková, Aneta ; Beran, Zdeněk (advisor) ; Nováková, Soňa (referee)
The principal aim of this thesis is to explore social and class relationships in British social-problem novel as seen through the eyes of three prominent Victorian writers including Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens. The industrial novel emerged from the problems arising from the rapid process of the Industrial Revolution, which is closely described, together with its severe impact on the lives of British inhabitants, in Chapter Two. Apart from the origin of class antagonism, the second chapter also depicts the responses of the oppressed and disadvantaged working class to the ruthlessness and greediness of the industrial manufacturers in the form of the Luddite uprising, the Chartists movement and independent strikes and riots which often turned into verbally or physically violent actions leading to further deterioration of working relations. The chapters Three to Five offer the views of the above- mentioned authors on such distorted relations, and each of them, through the characters of their books, represents a possible solution leading to their improvement. The truth is, however, that even though the opinions of each of the three authors were influenced by different political or theological theories they believed in, or by their very personal experience, all of them...
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The transforming power of places: the impact of the spatial setting on characters in Graham Greene's novel The Heart of the Matter
Shánělová, Jindra ; Beran, Zdeněk (advisor) ; Nováková, Soňa (referee)
The English novelist Graham Greene kept a journal for most of his life, except when it might threaten his safety.1 There he captured both mundane as well as extraordinary or otherwise noteworthy moments as a reminder in case he may one day run out of ideas for his fiction. As it happened, however, during his wartime service in African Sierra Leone, the danger of keeping any personal records could have posed too great a threat to himself and his professional interests that, as he came to regret some years later, he had to rely on his memory in order to put together scattered shreds of memories of this particular time of his life which became the main source for one of his masterpieces, the 1948 novel The Heart of the Matter. In it he captures the paradoxical situation of Europeans who for professional reasons inhabit these distant and alien corners of the Earth. There he places the protagonist, Major Scobie, and others in order to construe a drama of as common life as we know it, only spiced up by the African setting as a dislocating element, a background for the kaleidoscope of human problems that are correspondingly tinted by the tropical heat. It is the purpose of this paper to show the workings of the spatial setting as an inseparable part of the novel as well as its inevitable impact on the characters....
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Romantic Impulses in Victorian Literature
Beran, Zdeněk ; Hilský, Martin (advisor) ; Mánek, Bohuslav (referee) ; Peprník, Michal (referee)
The thesis attempts to discuss the character of late Romantic literature and art as it developed in England throughout the Victorian period. It follows the assertion made by G. Hough that it is possible to identify a continuous presence of Romantic ideas and methods in the writings of some major Victorian authors, and reflects the fact that there was actually no consensus or prevailing unequivocal view of Romanticism at that time, as is evidenced in the contradicting statements of such writers as John Ruskin and Walter Pater. The first objective of the thesis is thus to define the characteristic features of English Romanticism as they can be tracked down in the formative period of the 18th century and the time of High Romanticism of the first decades of the following century, and to see what transforming changes these characteristics underwent during the Victorian era. The sources of Romantic sensibility are located in the revolutionary role of the scientific discoveries of the 17th century and a new focus of the philosophical writings of that period, concerning mainly operations of the human mind. This development resulted in new aesthetic conceptions based on the two prevailing approaches, empiricism and Neo-Platonism. These theories conditioned the main concern of Romantic thought, i.e. an...
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