Eva Voldřichová Beránková Boeken

Examines European and American literatures from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tracing not only the trends common to the whole cultural region but also the differences manifested in particular national literatures. The book is divided into two parts: the first explores the transformation of paradigms in literatur and literacy criticism; the second offers portraits of individual writers, figures and myth from the period broadly understood as the "epoch of symbolism"

Meursault, his anti-hero, will not lie. When his mother dies, he refuses to show his emotions simply to satisfy the expectations of others. And when he commits a random act of violence on a sun-drenched beach near Algiers, his lack of remorse compounds his guilt in the eyes of society and the law. Yet he is as much a victim as a criminal.

Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a successful Parisian barrister, has come to recognize the deep-seated hypocrisy of his existence. His epigrammatic and, above all, discomforting monologue gradually saps, then undermines, the reader's own complacency.