Summa versologica. Květa Sgallová, O českém verši. Praha: Karolinum, 2015, 436 pp.

The volume reviewed herein summarizes twenty-two texts by Květa Sgallová (*1929), an expert in Czech verse theory, who laid the foundations for modern research into this field alongside Miroslav Červenka .The works selected come from the years 1964-2012 and vary in genre (conference papers, analyses of specific subtopics, extensive synthesizing studies) and extent (from 6 to 60 pages).The published texts are preceded by an author's preface, and they are accompanied by a bibliography of her works and an afterword, both by Robert Kolár, a disciple of Sgallová and Červenka.Květa Sgallová engaged in verse theory towards the end of the 1950s. 1 According to her own words, she was attracted by its empirical approach, its rationality, and its resistance to (at the time obligatorily Marxist) ideology.Her theoretical and methodological views were shaped by Prague structuralism, and especially by the interwar works of Jan Mukařovský and Roman Jakobson.Sgallová's first contribution to research into Czech verse was a review of Josef Hrabák's Studie o českém verši [Studies on Czech Verse] (1959).Her reviews in the 1960s -of Seymour Chatman's A Theory of Meter (1965) and of two anthologies, Mathematik und Dichtung and Poetyka i matematyka (both 1965), among others -betray a keen interest in the application of mathematical methods in literary scholarship.This was a trend in the Czech environment promoted by Jiří Levý, a renowned Anglicist and metrician (see his Paralipomena [1971], comprising papers in English, Polish, and Russian).This tendency is also apparent in Sgallová's first article, which deals with the use of punch cards in researching declamatory verse (trochaic verse with a variable number of syllables) of the Czech National Revival.This research culminated in her thesis Český deklamační verš v obrozenské literatuře [Declamatory Verse

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