Christopher Campo-Bowen, "Visions of the Village: Ruralness, Identity, and Czech Opera" (Oxford UP, 2025)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Aug 10, 2026 · 1h 13m

The Bartered Bride, a comic opera by Bedrich Smetana, premiered in Prague on March 30, 1866. Its pastoral love story and setting in a rural Czech village eventually became an enduring symbol of Czech nationalism. In Visions of the Village: Ruralness, Identity, and Czech Opera (Oxford University Press, 2025), Christopher Campo-Bowen examines how a particular image of the rural village in a set of Czech operas written between 1866 and 1904 became a powerful signifier for Czech ethnoracial and nationalist identity. He follows this conception of Czech identity and its entanglement with opera…