Multilingual writers of Prague in world literature

This thesis examines the concept of small literatures and its contribution to world literature. The statement is based on the history and politics of the Czech capital of Prague with multilingual writers -in German, French and American literature- as the basis. The first chapter studies Prague and its issues of territorial domination in the Austro-Hungarian Empire which illuminates a political approach to the Prague-German Kafka. The nationalistic cause of Jewish identity and its reflections on his novel The Trial are analysed through the theories of Pascale Casanova, Anne Jamison and Charles Sabatos. The second chapter studies Prague in the Prague Spring times with Milan Kundera and his political background of communism, later his views on Central Europe in comparison with Václav Havel. It will be argued that Kundera's aim of writing is to introduce his former nation to the rest of the world with his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, as well as his later writing in French. The third chapter studies Prague since the 1989 Velvet Revolution times with contemporary Czech-American writer Jaroslav Kalfař and political elements from his debut novel Spaceman of Bohemia. It suggests that Kalfař has followed the path of his literary fathers, Kafka and Kundera. It concludes in the idea of the literatures of the small nations become a weapon in the hands of these writers whose aims were to either support or defend a nationalist literary cause by contributing to the space of Weltliteratur.