The Critical Hybrid Edition (KHE) presents works of contemporary Czech literature alongside critical essays that help to better understand them. It combines a reader edition in book format and scholarly digital edition on DVD (freely available online for selected works).
Freely accessible digital scholarly editions of the Critical Hybrid Edition:
The Critical Hybrid Edition is prepared by members of the ICL’s Publishing and Textology Department, and jointly published by the ICL, Akropolis publishing house, and Memorial of National Literature in Prague. Preparation of KHE titles has also received support from the resources of the CAS Grant Agency, Czech Ministry of Culture, NAKI Foundation, and Grant Agency of the Czech Republic. Starting with third volume by Karel Klouda (ČVUT), the digital edition series is prepared by inSophy. Graphic design for both book and digital editions is the work of Markéta Jelenová.
Some volumes in the series – as in the case of František Gellner and Karel Hlaváček – present an author’s complete works, including correspondence, reproductions of works of art, selections from secondary literature and other textual or illustrative materials. Others – as with Petr Bezruč’s Silesian Songs and . H. Mácha’s May – present a single work with a complex textual history. The printed reader edition of the KHE, with its layout, accompanying texts, and edits concerning language, aims at a wider readership. The scholarly digital edition contains all versions of a text (printed and non-printed, complete and incomplete), presented in both facsimile manuscript and transcript format. The primary text is then presented in edited format, accompanied by a synoptic record of all variants and other analytical features. In the case of collected works, a digital application allows the reader to sort the works by genre, its appearance in an original collection, or chronologically. Some works feature a timeline showing important milestones in the author’s work and life.
The digital edition is committed to adapting to changes in technology and software capabilities. For example, it is gradually moving away from proprietary platforms (as in the case of The Works of František Gellner) to the international text encoding standard TEI P5 (as with K. H. Mácha’s May). The array of functionalities are expanded and changed (the manner of displaying changes in the text, for example, and their statistical processing, as well as the form of displaying manuscript facsimiles, the layout of transcription modules, or issue lists). The KHE thus adapts not only to technical developments, but also to the specifics of published texts, so that new possibilities for presenting series texts may be adopted with each new title.
Several essays by Jiří Flaišman and Michal Kosák trace the configuration, development, and evolution of works in the KHE series: ‘Critical Hybrid Edition: Publishing the Works of František Gellner and Karel Hlaváček (How Textual Variants are Processed and Recorded)’ (Czech Literature 57, 2009, No. 2, April, pp. 266–275); ‘Notes on the Editing of Manuscripts in the Critical Hybrid Edition’ (Litikon 2, 2017, No. 1, June, pp. 38–43); and ‘Textual Genetics and Critical Hybrid Edition’ (Czech Literature 68, 2020, No. 6, March 2021, pp. 697–704). Feedback on individual titles and other literature on KHE can be found here.
Several volumes, including Karel Toman’s Poetic Works, K. J. Erben’s Bouquet, and Jiří Kolář’s Prometheus’s Liver, are currently being prepared for publication. Contact addresses: kosak@ucl.cas.cz, flaisman@ucl.cas.cz.
