Romantic imagination in a comparative perspective: English and Slovak Romantic literature

The paper discusses Romantic imagination in two, relatively distant, national literatures. The first part is concerned with the problems comparative literature has faced in recent decades. In the second part, the work of two Slovak Romantic writers, Ján Kollár and Janko Kráľ, is compared to the poetry of Lord Gordon Byron and William Wordsworth. By identifying certain affinities between the discussed literary works, the authors point to the importance of the concept of national literature which has not lost its role even in contemporary literary studies.