The 1990s and their Memory: Nostalgia and Trauma in Young Czech Literature

The 1990s represented a decade marked by the fall of communism and the emergence of a free and capitalist society in Czechoslovakia (and its successor, the Czech Republic). With the passage of time, the motifs of the decade's memories begin to show in Czech prose; the literary representations of the memory of the 1990s can be usually found, among others, in the works of authors of the young generation who lived in the post-revolutionary period during their childhood or adolescence. In our study, through the analysis of excerpts from novels written by authors from this generation, we observed and characterized the different modes of this collective memory, in which nostalgia predominates, but social criticism and signs of trauma can be found as well.