Imagined Geographies

Central European Spatial Narratives between 1984 and 2014

In 1984 Czech writer Milan Kundera published his essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe” in the New York Review of Books, which established the framework for disputes about the space “between East and West” for the following thirty years. Even today, the echo of those debates is still audible in spatial narratives. Discussing the way in which literary figures are positioned within new hierarchies such as gender, class, or ethnicity, this volume shows how the space of the imagined Central Europe has been de- and reconstructed. Special attention is paid to the role of the past in shaping contemporary spatial discourse.