Worlds of Hungarian Writing; National Literature as Intercultural Exchange by András Kiséry, Zsolt Komáromy, and Zsuzsanna Varga (review)

• Published in: The Comparatist Vol. 43; no. 1; pp. 380 - 382
• Main Author: Basa, Enikő Molnár
• Format: Journal Article Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Chapel Hill The University of North Carolina Press 2019
• Subjects: Comparative literature; Cultural heritage; Culture; Essays; Hungarian literature; Literary criticism; Nonfiction; Novels; Oppression; Southey, Robert (1774-1843); Writers; Hungary; United Kingdom > UK; Europe; Wales
• ISSN: 0195-7678; 1559-0887; 1559-0887
• DOI: 10.1353/com.2019.0024

The work opens with an essay on "World Literature in Hungarian Literary Culture," followed by twelve studies addressing issues such as translatability and the fact that the most popular writers (Kert&ész, Nádas, Krasznahorkai, Eszterházi) "are not representative of the entirety of Hungarian literature" (7). [...]the purpose of this book is to "open up Hungarian literary culture to foreign, Anglophone readers by highlighting its intercultural contexts, but also to identify some of the ways in which such contexts may broaden the understanding of a national literary culture from a vantage point within that culture" (9). The genre is best examined in cross-cultural terms for two reasons: 1) "it is a unique byproduct of self-conscious generic experiments related to the nineteenth-century epic that can be observed in various national literatures" and: 2) the Hungarian verse novel, while a response to the Hungarian situation, has "its immediate incentives [in] the verse narratives of Byron and Pushkin (Don Juan and Eugene Onegin in particular)" (93–94). The volume is an invaluable study of Hungarian literary criticism in terms of comparative studies.