’...and Miraculously Post-Modern Became Ost-Modern’ : How On or About 1910 and 1924 Karel Čapek Helped to Add and Strike off the ‘P’

Abstract

Virginia Woolf and Karel Čapek produced direct responses to the British Empire Exhibition in the forms of – in Woolf’s case – a scathing essay entitled ‘Thunder at Wembley’ and – in Čapek’s case – a (P)OstModernist travelogue later published as part of ‘Letters from England’ translated into English in 1925 and banned by the Nazis as well as the Communists. This research paper juxtaposes modernity in Central Europe with its ‘Other’ – that in Western Europe – by exploring Woolf and Čapek’s durée réelle between 1910 and 1924. It offers an analysis of Karel Čapek’s (P)OstModern legacies, placing Prague right on the modernist centre stage. The socio-political contribution of Central European regional modernism in Čapek’s work is increasingly vital to the contemporary Europe of Brexit and refugee and migrant crises, and beyond.