Abstrakt
The paper explores the role of environment in the small town imaginary. Using the case of Kdyně, a small town in Czechoslovakia, during the interwar period, the study conducts the semantic analysis of visual and textual representations of the locality that ranged from paintings and place-related poetry, to tourist and promotional texts, to banal discourses that framed the making of urban infrastructures and refashioning of the place to a resort.
The study reveals the highly multifaceted relations between the town and its natures. Nature played constitutive role in the representations of the small town, but it often served as connector to metropolitan world in the imaginary that alternated between the pastoral images of a country town and the metropolitan fantasies of Kdyně as a place with urban-like traits.
The article therefore calls for a more intricate rendering of the boundaries between nature and culture, the country and the city, and the small-town and big-city cultures