Péter Hajdú - Böcker

This is Volume 14 of 150 the Uralic and Altaic series covering the period of 1960 to 1990. This volume focuses on the Samoyed peoples and languages. Thousands of years ago the ancestors of both the present Finno-Ugrians and the Samoyeds lived together in their Uralic homeland. Linguistics has designated them and their language Uralic. Migration of the Samoyeds in the third or fourth millennium B.C. disrupted Uralic unity. Thus the Finno-Ugrians and the Samoyeds parted ways. However, the fact that the present-day Samoyed languages and the Finno-Ugric languages can be traced back to a common origin vouch for the importance of research into the Samoyed languages.

Péter Hajdu examines the cultivation of the Classics as an intellectual framework and crucial ingredient of the western aspect of Hungarian national identity. This book approaches the relationship of modern Hungarian culture to classical heritage from the various viewpoints of identity politics, education, translation history, scholarship, and its impact on literature. When the Hungarian nation-building project developed ideas of national identity, it necessarily incorporated the historical narrative according to which the Hungarians arrived at their current homeland in the Middle Ages, and only later did it adopt European culture. The duplicity of a mostly imagined Asian, pagan, barbaric or nomadic culture, and a Western, Christian, civilized identity, deeply rooted in European culture, has played and continues to play a role in the Hungarian discourse.Hajdu also studies the gradual disappearance of classics from the Hungarian school education since the 19th century, which has been accompanied by fervid political debates. However, over this period, translations of classical texts paradoxically became more frequent and popular with the decline of a classical education, even though fewer readers had access to the original texts. Despite this change, the translation strategies tended to remain school-bound. The knowledge of classical literature still leaves traces on Hungarian literature, which Hajdu explores using examples from nineteenth-century novels and contemporary poetry. This book sheds light on a topic of classical reception that has remained largely unexplored in this part of Europe, but one which has an incredibly rich history, culture and literary tradition.

Péter Hajdu examines the cultivation of the Classics as an intellectual framework and crucial ingredient of the western aspect of Hungarian national identity. This book approaches the relationship of modern Hungarian culture to classical heritage from the various viewpoints of identity politics, education, translation history, scholarship, and its impact on literature. When the Hungarian nation-building project developed ideas of national identity, it necessarily incorporated the historical narrative according to which the Hungarians arrived at their current homeland in the Middle Ages, and only later did it adopt European culture. The duplicity of a mostly imagined Asian, pagan, barbaric or nomadic culture, and a Western, Christian, civilized identity, deeply rooted in European culture, has played and continues to play a role in the Hungarian discourse.Hajdu also studies the gradual disappearance of classics from the Hungarian school education since the 19th century, which has been accompanied by fervid political debates. However, over this period, translations of classical texts paradoxically became more frequent and popular with the decline of a classical education, even though fewer readers had access to the original texts. Despite this change, the translation strategies tended to remain school-bound. The knowledge of classical literature still leaves traces on Hungarian literature, which Hajdu explores using examples from nineteenth-century novels and contemporary poetry. This book sheds light on a topic of classical reception that has remained largely unexplored in this part of Europe, but one which has an incredibly rich history, culture and literary tradition.

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'.