J.R.R. Tolkien in Central Europe: Context, Directions, and the Legacy

This volume is a long overdue contribution to the dynamic, but unevenly distributed study of fantasy and J.R.R. Tolkien’s legacy in Central Europe. The chapters move between and across theories of cultural and social history, reception, adaptation, and audience studies, and offer methodological reflections on the various cultural perceptions of Tolkien’s oeuvre and its impact on twenty-first century manifestations. They analyse how discourses about fantasy are produced and mediated, and how processes of re-mediation shape our understanding of the historical coordinates and local peculiarities of fantasy in general, and Tolkien in particular, all that in Central Europe in an age of global fandom. The collection examines the entanglement of fantasy and Central European political and cultural shifts across the past 50 years and traces the ways in which its haunting legacy permeates and subverts different modes and aesthetics across different domains from communist times through today’s media-saturated culture.

Janka Kascakova is Associate Professor in English at the Catholic University of Ruzomberok, Slovakia and Palacký University Olomouc, the Czech Republic. Her research centers on modernism and the modernist short story, especially the works of Katherine Mansfield, and fantasy literature, chiefly the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

David Levente Palatinus is Associate Professor in Media and Cultural Studies at the Catholic University in Ruzomberok and the Technical University of Liberec.He recently co-edited Gothic Metamorphoses across the Centuries (2020). His book Human / Non / Human: Technics and Subjectivity across Media is forthcoming in 2023.