Our teams of literary scholars have recently obtained an important research grant Attempting the Renaissance of the West: the Literary and Intellectual Climate at the Turn of the 20th Century financed by the Czech Science Foundation. The project focuses on Western Literature of the late 19th and early 20th century, a period previously studied only from the perspective of national literatures. From the comparative point of view, it analyses a supranational literary and intellectual movement unified by a shared need of Modernist revision, albeit reflected in different ways in different countries. Conclusions will be summarized in two foreign language monographs, intended as a contribution to the international academic debate. A third collective monograph will offer Czech scholars the first comprehensive survey of the literatures of the period. Our interdisciplinary team will comprise researchers from the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, Prague, including the youngest generation of Ph.D. and Post-Doctoral researchers and invited foreign specialists.

The aim of this interdisciplinary research is to encourage a reappraisal of fin-de-siècle literature and an appreciation of the importance of the period to our understanding of contemporary Western culture.

The Institute’s major linguistic initiative includes a team projects entitled Romance Languages in the Light of Language Corpora – verifying conclusions made by modern linguistics through corpora of Romance languages. The most important output of this project is a collective monograph Románské jazyky a čeština ve svelte paralelních korpusů (2015). This unique publication analyses 4 structurally different phenomena in the Romance languages and, with the help of the parallel corpus InterCorp, studies their possible translations into Czech offering, thus, a fresh, different and modern approach to contrastive studies. Preparations of the monograph took three years and the collective of authors includes both experienced academics from the Institute and young Ph.D. and post-doc researches.