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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.
At the point of its creation in 1873, Budapest was intended to be a pleasant rallying point of orderliness, high culture and elevated social principles: the jewel in the national crown. From the turn of the century to World War II, however, the Hungarian capital was described, variously, as: Judapest, the sinful city, not in Hungary, and the Chicago of the Balkans. This is the first English-language study of competing metropolitan narratives in Hungarian literature that spans both the liberal late Habsburg and post-liberal, 'Christian-national' eras, at the same time as the 'Jewish Question' became increasingly inseparable from representations of the city. Works by writers from a wide variety of backgrounds are discussed, from Jewish satirists to icons of the radical Right, representatives of conservative national schools, and modernist, avant-garde and 'peasantist' authors. Gwen Jones is Hon. Research Associate at the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London.
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A great masterpiece never before available in English, Kornél Esti is the wild final book by a Hungarian genius. Crazy, funny and gorgeously dark, Kornél Esti sets into rollicking action a series of adventures about a man and his wicked dopplegänger, who breathes every forbidden idea of his childhood into his ear, and then reappears decades later. Part Gogol, part Chekhov, and all brilliance, Kosztolányi in his final book serves up his most magical, radical, and intoxicating work. Here is a novel which inquires: What if your id (loyally keeping your name) decides to strike out on its own, cuts a disreputable swath through the world, and then sends home to you all its unpaid bills and ruined maidens? And then: What if you and your alter ego decide to write a book together?
This book contains the complete poems in Hungarian and in English translation of Hungary's great modern poet, Miklos Radnoti, murdered at the age of 35 during the Holocaust. His earliest poems, the six books published during his lifetime, and the poems published posthumously after World War II are included. There is a foreword by Győző Ferencz, one of Hungary's foremost experts on Radnoti's poems, and accompanying essays by the author on dominant themes and recurring images, as well as the relevance of Radnoti's work to Holocaust literature.
Written between 1282-1285, Gesta Hungarorum is an ingenious and imaginative historical fiction of prehistory, medieval history and contemporary social history. The author divides Hungarian history into two periods: Hunnish-Hungarian prehistory and Hungarian history, a division which persisted in Hungary up to the beginnings of modern historiography.
** NOW SHORTLISTED FOR THE WARWICK WOMEN IN TRANSLATION PRIZE 2019 ** ** WINNER OF THE 2018 PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE ** BY THE AUTHOR OF THE DOOR, ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF 2015 "Extraordinary" New York Times "Quite unforgettable" Daily Telegraph "Unusual, piercing . . . oddly percipient" Irish Times "A gorgeous elegy" Publishers Weekly "A brightly shining star in the Szabo universe" World Literature Today In prewar Budapest three families live side by side on gracious Katalin Street, their lives closely intertwined. A game is played by the four children in which Bálint, the promising son of the Major, invariably chooses Irén Elekes, the headmaster's dutiful el...
First published in 2005. This is one of the literary memoirs written by Transylvanian aristocrats in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Baron Apor lamented the passing of traditional Transylvanian practices and the Metamorphosis, written in 1783, is not a memoir in the usual sense so much as a record of a vanishing way of life that the author had enjoyed in his youth. Exceptional, enchanting and exhilarating, this account of Transylvania is irresistible.
Alberto Manguel praises the Hungarian writer László Földényi as “one of the most brilliant essayists of our time.” Földényi’s extraordinary Melancholy, with its profusion of literary, ecclesiastical, artistic, and historical insights, gives proof to such praise. His book, part history of the term melancholy and part analysis of the melancholic disposition, explores many centuries to explore melancholy’s ambiguities. Along the way Földényi discovers the unrecognized role melancholy may play as a source of energy and creativity in a well-examined life. Földényi begins with a tour of the history of the word melancholy, from ancient Greece to the medieval era, the Renaissance, ...
First published in 2000. Letters from Turkey, considered the best Hun,garian prose of the eighteenth century, is written by Kelemen Mikes, a Transylvanian nobleman who went into exile with Ferenc Rakoczi II, the Prince of Transylvania, after the War of Independence in 1704 - 1711 in which the Prince fought to preserve independent Transylvania. The Prince and his entourage spent some years in France, and were then invited to Turkey by Sultan Ahmed III, going there in 1717. Some of the party eventually left, but, like Rakoczi, Mikes spent the rest of life in exile in Turkey. This memoir had a considerable vogue in Transylvania at the time, and Mikes writes in a well-established tradition. The ...