Description
Book SynopsisIn 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 Erdős 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.
Trade Review“The result is a fascinating reading about important stations in the selected writers' lives and careers along with Menyhért’s well-reflected challenging of their existing place in the Hungarian literary canon and her convincing arguments for the place they deserve in that very same canon. She undertakes this re-evaluation not only for the sake of demonstrating the shortcomings and narrow-mindedness of the existing canon but also to offer herself and other women writing today some literary predecessors of their own gender they can build on, both in terms of language and literary imagery and technique, and from whom they can take their inspiration. She demonstrates, against the oft-reiterated argument (by both male and some female literary critics and writers) that there is only one literature irrespective of the author’s gender, that gender matters, and that it matters to a very important degree when it comes to who is allowed entry into the canon and who, and why, is pushed to its margins or altogether out of it.” - Agatha Schwartz, University of Ottawa Canada, in Hungarian Cultural Studies Vol. 14 2021 pp. 260-263
Table of ContentsForeword: 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 Erdős (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, Dezső 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
