Countryside in the Official Prose 1970s and 1980s

During the normalization period, the topic of countryside life in literature started to reappear. Many prosaic works depicted character's departure from the city to the countryside and his/her beginning of their new life in unknown surroundings. This thesis focuses on such works of art, published between the 1970s and 1980s. It compares four officially published examples of countryside novels containing any mark of escapism (in novels written by Jan Otčenášek, Bohumil Říha, Jiří Medek, Jan Kostrhun) with examples of prose published in samizdat or exile (Mojmír Klánský, Milan Kundera). Through intertextual as well as thematic and compositional analysis, the thesis investigates common features contained in this "escapist" literature. The analysis is inspired by the poetics of space and by the concept of the countryside as an idyllic space