Ioana Bot

The Allegories of Reading Eminescu

There is a special area of research in Romanian literary history commonly known as „eminescology”. The author describes the problematic heritage of this field of study, and outlines a possible reading of Eminescu starting from the allegories of reading and from the types of irony described by Paul de Man.

John Neubauer

The Idea of Europe – Treading on Native Ground

Various signs show that the earlier visionary spirit is being gradually replaced by a new wave of nationalism in Western Europe, where the process of integration had started. To capture the dynamics of past processes in order to understand what may be ahead of us is both a manner of speaking about the “idea of Europe” and a challenge for comparative literature.

Lajos Kántor

A History of Poetics into Literary History

A recent book by Tibor Gintli and Gábor Schein, Az irodalom rövid története (The Short History of Literature) is the starting point of the article where some of the missing authors and missing genres become

grounds for writing more generally about the possibilities of literary history.

Zsuzsa Selyem

Inside–Outside: the Poetics of the Female Body

One of the possibilities for the écriture feminine is dealing with the poetics of the body. The thematic anthologies edited in Hungarian by Zsuzsa Forgács brought about discussions concerning the presence of female experience and discourse in Hungarian culture. The se-cond anthology of the collection Kitakart Psyché (Psyche Uncovered), called Szomjas oázis (The Thirsty Oasis) contains texts about the female body. The article discusses the aspects of novelty in these literary texts.

Márton Szilágyi

„Fogságom naplója” as Text and Historical Source

The author attempts a contextualization of a well-known text by Ferenc Kazinczy, Fogságom naplója (The Diary of my Captivity), where the text is analysed besides several other sources concerning the facts represented in Kazinczy’s book. By showing the complex relationship of the text to other types of nonliterary texts, the article also shows how the ‘cultural turn’ can be conceived in literary history.

Zsombor Tóth

Missing Paradigms? Contextualization in Old Hungarian Literature

Asserting that the scholarly issue of contex-tualization has remained a touchy problem in old Hungarian literature, Zsombor Tóth draws an insightful and broad conceptual set of tools around the question of context. His paper revisits the traditions of historical anthropology and reconceptualizes their key elements in order to be applicable also on Hungarian lite-rary texts. In doing so the paper defines the li-terary historians task along the cultural transfer / translation of historical anthropology introducing several less discussed elements: the problem of culture in old Hungarian texts, the usage of texts and writing in the very same context.

Hanna-Orsolya Vincze

The Beginnings of Hungarian Literary Translation Culture

Conceptual history hardly ever played any role in the analysis and interpretation of Hungarian translation culture. Therefore the major historical political concepts and their pragmatics remained hidden for a long time when approaching this important body of texts. The writer of the paper unfolds a whole series of interpretive possibilities by touching on the classical themes and questions of conceptual history, his paper functioning also as a programmatic essay in revisiting the beginnings of Hungarian literary translation culture.

Levente T. Szabó

The Social History of the Modern Hungarian Literary Profession

The paper is part of a monograph focusing on the social history of the constitution of the Hungarian literary profession along the professional career of Pál Gyulai. This narrower set of arguments frames its major theoretical considerations closely linked and responding to the professionalization studies that have usually dismissed literature and literary stu-dies. Starting from the basic idea that the rise of professional identity and meritocracy reshaped also the structure and institutions of literature, Szabó follows this process along three main lines: the modernization of literature in the framework of the modern disciplinary system, of the modern cultural market and commodification, respectively of the educational standardization. Along this train of thought the paper analyses a series of modern literary and artistic institutions, ranging from the rise of the copright and modern authorship to the beginnings and specialization of literary criticism.