The year 1989 marked a change in the political system of Czechoslovakia, as in all countries behind the Iron Curtain. Many prominent individuals who had been excluded from public life and from the universities now returned, some of them assuming important positions in cultural, academic and/or political life. In 1993, Czechoslovakia broke up into two independent states, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. This peaceful division also created a divide between Czech and Slovak literary life. As a result, literary histories in each of the two countries also took a slightly different course; after the dissolution of the Republic, we can speak of different national directions. Literary historiographies in the Czech and Slovak Republic share some questions and problems, but the contexts are different. There have been and are various forms of scholarly collaboration and debates, but on the whole the Czech and Slovak environments have been developing separately. In this section, we concentrate on developments in the Czech Republic.