Worlds of Hungarian writing : national literature as intercultural exchange

Worlds of Hungarian Writing responds to the rapidly growing interest in Hungarian authors throughout the English-speaking world. Addressing an international audience, the essays in the collection highlight the intercultural contexts that have molded the conventions, genres and institutions of Hungarian writing from the nineteenth century to the present. They are mapping some of the ways in which a modern literature is produced by encounters with languages, cultures, and media external to its traditionally conceived boundaries. But rather than viewing intercultural exchange as an external force, the collection recognizes its enabling importance to the globalizing reception and circulation of Hungarian writing over the continuities and constraints implied by more traditional national narratives. Worlds of Hungarian Writing posits intercultural exchange as the very substance of a literary culture.Discussions of the politics of appropriation and translation, of the impact of émigré writers and critics, and of the use of world-literary models in genre-formation complement studies of the fate of western leftist critical theory in post-1989 Hungary, of the role of African-American models in contemporary Roma culture, and of the use of photography in late 20th-century prose. The volume spans a wide generic range, from the achievements of such canonical 19th-century critics and poets as József Bajza and János Arany, to neglected women authors-translators such as Theresa Pulszky, to modernist writers and critics like Antal Szerb and György Lukács, and to the contemporary novelists Péter Esterházy, Péter Nádas, and László Krasznahorkai. Each essay is an original contribution to comparative literature and to the study of this Central-European literature, but is intended to be accessible to readers unfamiliar with its traditions. Acknowledgments Note on Translations Note on Contributors Introduction: World Literature in Hungarian Literary Culture by Andras Kisery and Zsolt Komaromy:Chapter 1: Wordsworth in Hungary": An Essay on Reception as Cultural Memory andForgetting by Zsolt KomaromyChapter 2: Negotiating the Popular/National Voice: Impropriety in Two HungarianTranslations of Robert Burns by Veronika RuttkayChapter 3: Translation, Modernization and the Female Pen: Hungarian Women asLiterary Mediators in the Nineteenth Century by Zsuzsanna VargaChapter 4: The Hungarian Verse Novel in a Cross-Cultural Perspective by Julia BacskaiAtkariChapter 5: Antal Szerb's The Queen's Necklace: A `true story' of Cross-cultural Intersections in Hungarian Literature by Agnes Vashegyi MacDonaldChapter 6: Mediation and Hybridity: Twentieth-Century Hungarian Emigre Literary Scholars by Sandor HitesChapter 7: The New Left's Use and Abuse of Gyoergy Lukacs's Thought by Gyoergy TuryChapter 8: Recontextualization, Localization, Hybridization: Intercultural Matrices inHungarian Roma and African American Life Writings by Tamas DemenyChapter 9: The Cultural (Un)Turn in Hungarian Literary Scholarship in the 1990s:Strategies of Inclusion and Exclusion by Gyoergyi HorvathChapter 10: Borderline Fiction: Eastern Europe and East-West Encounters in LaszloKrasznahorkai's Works by Edit ZsadanyiChapter 11: Text, Image, Memory: Intermediality in the Work of Peter Nadas by Lauren WalshChapter 12: Monuments and Bulldozers: Social Memory Landscapes in Peter Esterhazy'sCelestial Harmonies and Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father by Katalin OrbanIndex About the Editors and Contributors This book discusses modern Hungarian literary culture as a site of intercultural exchange, suggesting through a variety of case-studies that encounters with foreign literatures are integral to national literary tradition, and studying them renews critical perspectives on national literary history. It contributes to current reconsiderations of methods of literary historiography, and will appeal to readers interested in Hungarian literature, and to scholars of reception study, cultural memory, comparative literary study, and of world literature