Overview

Synthesizes contemporary research on world literature while introducing Hungarian literature’s 'worldliness' to an international readership. Hungarian Literature as World Literature provides readers less familiar with the Hungarian national context with new access to local variations on an already familiar comparative or historical problem. Rather than reducing the project of situating Hungarian literature as world literature to a search for causal, mechanical and hierarchical types of influence exerted by world literature on Hungarian literature, or investigating the latter’s sporadic occurrences on the 'great stage' of literature in the major languages, the volume offers a more complex and nuanced way to reveal the multimodal relationships they form. Authors in this volume consider the Hungarian national literature as an open geo-poetical and geopolitical space, which is at once wider and smaller than the monolingual, nation-state oriented, territorially closed frame of observation that characterizes most national literary historiography. In this intersectional space, the geopolitical reading discloses local transformations of broader poetical or ideological movements and their feedback into the world system, the geopolitical contexts behind poetic forms and narrative constructions. Hungarian Literature as World Literature draws a vital link between the collecting and curating practices that preserve and disseminate Hungarian literature and a theoretical conversation that is being held in English, on an international level, about the future of the concept of 'world literature'.

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9781501393129

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Reviews

Highly informative, methodologically provocative, and engagingly written, Hungarian Literature as World Literature is not a collection of exhibits but a palimpsest that brings together geographies and histories, traumas and dreams, discourses and ideologies – in short, an array of worlds experienced through one of the most fascinating literatures in our own world. * Andrei Terian, Professor of Romanian Literature, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania *

Author Information

Péter Hajdu is Senior Fellow at the Institute for Literary Studies, Research Centre for Humanities, Hungary. For the past two decades, he has served as chief editor of Neohelicon, a major international journal on comparative literature studies. Zoltán Z. Varga is Senior Fellow at the Institute for Literary Studies, Research Centre for Humanities, Hungary, and Associate Professor of Literary Theory at University of Pécs, Hungary. He serves on the editorial board of the Neohelicon (managing editor between 2013–2018) and the European Journal of Life Writing.

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