V interesu pomníku : strategie kanonizace literátky na přelomu století
In the interest of the monument : strategies for the canonization of the literary woman at the turn of the century

Summary/Abstract: Monuments to deceased writers erected in public space helped to create visible and permanent sites of memory in the second half of the 19th century. Thus they helped to constitute a widely shared canon of Czech national literature. In that time institutions such as Svatobor and the Czech Academy played a key role in the field of commemoration. As far as women were concerned, Aleida Assmann's observation regarding a structural amnesia can be applied here without any hesitation. This fact can be very well observed after the death of Karolina Světlá in September 1899, when Eliška Krásnohorská attempted to break the status quo. She undertook a determined, assertive campaign to commemorate the writer in the form of a monument on Charles Square (another was planned and eventually erected in Podještědí). She did not hesitate to write to the president of the Academy, Josef Hlávka, to organize a petition of writers and editors, to dramatize Světlá's short story "in the interest of the monument" and to donate the proceeds for its realization. The result was the first monument to a female writer in the urban space of Prague.

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