Worlds of Hungarian Writing responds to the rapidly growing interest in Hungarian authors throughout the English-speaking world. Addressing an international audience, the essays in the collection highlight the intercultural contexts that have molded the conventions, genres and institutions of Hungarian writing from the nineteenth century to the present. They are mapping some of the ways in which a modern literature is produced by encounters with languages, cultures, and media external to its traditionally conceived boundaries. But rather than viewing intercultural exchange as an external force, the collection recognizes its enabling importance to the globalizing reception and circulation of Hungarian writing over the continuities and constraints implied by more traditional national narratives. Worlds of Hungarian Writing posits intercultural exchange as the very substance of a literary culture. Discussions of the politics of appropriation and translation, of the impact of emigre writers and critics, and of the use of world-literary models in genre-formation complement studies of the fate of western leftist critical theory in post-1989 Hungary, of the role of African-American models in contemporary Roma culture, and of the use of photography in late 20th-century prose. The volume spans a wide generic range, from the achievements of such canonical 19th-century critics and poets as Jozsef Bajza and Janos Arany, to neglected women authors-translators such as Theresa Pulszky, to modernist writers and critics like Antal Szerb and Gyoergy Lukacs, and to the contemporary novelists Peter Esterhazy, Peter Nadas, and Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Each essay is an original contribution to comparative literature and to the study of this Central-European literature, but is intended to be accessible to readers unfamiliar with its traditions.

Nyugat is Hungary's most renowned literary, cultural and social magazine. It was published between 1908 and 1941, and directly affected literary and cultural modernism in that country. Contributors of Nyugat were part of the 'Great Generation' of talented artists and intellectuals who developed their works under the pressures of rapid political, social and cultural transformation in Hungary, and in turn I call them Generation West. My study conveys a story of Nyugat by focusing on three of its authors and their key works during the Hungarian modernist turn, namely Dezs Kosztolanyi, Margit Kaffka, and Antal Szerb. Their lives and works depict and epitomize the experience of Hungarian identity in which the notions of aestheticism, high culture and scholasticism are expressed through the the themes of language, nostalgia and commemoration. The book will appeal to specialists in Central European and Hungarian Modernist Studies, and to interdisciplinary scholars in literature, social and cultural theory, and social history, as well as to larger audiences interested in the fin-de-siecle Central European art, literary and coffeehouse culture, and print media.