Women's Literary Tradition and Twentieth-Century Hungarian Writers

Renée Erdős, Ágnes Nemes Nagy, Minka Czóbel, Ilona Harmos Kosztolányi, Anna Lesznai
Erscheinungsjahr 2019
ISBN: 978-90-04-41738-0
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 3, 340 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 702 g

Reihe: Women Writers in History

In Women’s Literary Tradition and Twentieth-Century Hungarian Writers, Anna Menyhért presents the cases of five women writers whose legacy literary criticism has neglected or distorted, thereby depriving succeeding generations of vital cultural memory and inspiration. A best-selling novelist and poet in her time, Renée Erdos wrote innovatively about women's experience of sexual love. Minka Czóbel wrote modern trauma texts only to pass into literary history branded, as a result of ideological pressure in communist times, as an 'ugly woman'. Ágnes Nemes Nagy, celebrated for her ‘masculine’ poems, felt she must suppress her ‘feminine’ poems. Famous writer’s widow Ilona Harmos Kosztolányi’s autobiographical writing tackles the physical challenges of girls' adolescence, and offers us a woman’s thoughtful Holocaust memoir. Anna Lesznai, émigrée and visual artist, wove together memory and fiction using techniques from patchworking and embroidery.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Menyhért, Anna

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Prosa, Erzählung, Roman, Prosaautoren
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Lyrik und Dichter
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Finnische, Ungarische und Estnische Literaturen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literatursoziologie, Gender Studies
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Foreword: a Writer in Search of Her Foremothers

emsp;Nadezhda Alexandrova and Suzan van Dijk

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Translator’s Note


1 A Tradition of One’s Own

emsp;1 A Tradition of Forgetting

emsp;2 Canons and Sinking Streams

emsp;3 Women’s Literature

emsp;4 My Own Say

emsp;5 From Room to Room, All the Way to My Own Room

emsp;6 A Portrait Gallery on the Museum’s Postcard

2 Between Love and the Canon: Renée Erdos (1879–1956)

emsp;1 Author’s House: Closed

emsp;2 Private Life – Literary Life

emsp;3 Woman Writer at the Journal Future

emsp;4 The Woman Writer’s Chances

emsp;5 Voices in the Novels

emsp;6 Fracture

emsp;7 Success in Her Time

emsp;8 Contemporary Reviews

emsp;9 The Label of Erotic Lady Author

emsp;10 Female Voice, Female Verse

emsp;11 The Author’s House Is Open

3 In the Canon with Secrets: Ágnes Nemes Nagy (1922–1991) and the Women’s Literary Tradition

emsp;1 The Weeping Poetess

emsp;2 Secret Poems and the Writing of Literary History

emsp;3 The Female Poet and Objective Poetry

emsp;4 Woman’s Room, Woman’s Landscape, Woman’s Body

emsp;5 Self-Liquidation and Recognition

emsp;6 A Woman’s Role

emsp;7 Statue and Mask

emsp;8 Women’s Poetic Tradition

emsp;9 Entering the Room

emsp;10 Epilogue

4 No Canon for Otherness - The Witch: Minka Czóbel (1854–1943)

emsp;1 The Enigmatic Monographer

emsp;2 The Mysterious Bob

emsp;3 Detective Work

emsp;4 Painting a Portrait

emsp;5 Writing between the Lines

emsp;6 Ugly, Ugly, Not Fit for the Canon

emsp;7 Contemporary Views of Minka Czóbel

emsp;8 The Feminist Witch

emsp;9 The Otherness of the Witch

emsp;10 Loss of Control

emsp;11 Perversion, Horror, Revenge, Web

emsp;12 Boundaries, Mirrors

emsp;13 Reading the Witch

5 Mirror, Body, Trauma - a Writer’s Wife at the Edge of the Canon: Ilona Harmos Kosztolányi (1885–1967)

emsp;1 To Big Girls about Little Girls

emsp;2 Widow, Pigeonholed: the Writer’s Wife

emsp;3 Female Reading

emsp;4 Body

emsp;5 Mirror

emsp;6 Women’s Holocaust Memoirs

emsp;7 Trauma: Persecutors and Persecuted

emsp;8 Setting the Stage for Death

emsp;9 Connections: Ilona Harmos, Minka Czóbel, Dezso Kosztolányi, Ágnes Nemes Nagy

emsp;10 The Writing Woman

emsp;11 Sitting Down at the Writing Desk

6 Museum, Cult, Memory - Locked in the Canon: Lesznai (1885–1966)

emsp;1 Memory’s Volunteers

emsp;2 The Well- Known Woman Writer

emsp;3 Museum, Cult, Memory

emsp;4 Dusting Off a Novel

emsp;5 Belatedness and Renewal

emsp;6 Threads and Patterns

emsp;7 Female Figures

emsp;8 A Father’s Blessing

emsp;9 The Novel that Remembers

emsp;10 Nižný Hrušov – Memory’s Tou

Apendix 1 List of Poems and Their Translators

Apendix 2 A List of Titles of Works Referred to in English and in Hungarian

Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Anna Menyhért is a Professor of Trauma Studies at the University of Jewish Studies in Budapest. She is an academic and a writer; her research focuses on two threads: trauma in the digital age and women’s literature.

Anna Bentley has been translating Hungarian literature since 2015. She graduated from the Balassi Institute, Budapest’s Literary Translation Programme in 2018.