The Novels of Zsigmond Moricz in the Context of European Realism is the first English-language monograph on one of Hungary's-and Central Europe's-most important modern authors. Using a thematic approach that privileges literary characters as stand-ins for real human beings, Virginia L. Lewis investigates Moricz's thematization of individual agency in seven realist novels that form the foundation of the author's reputation as a major twentieth-century novelist. Lewis does an outstanding job of showcasing the research results of the many Hungarian scholars who have studied Moricz's narrative output over the past century, while also bringing decidedly new perspectives to the table in introducing the author to an English-speaking audience. Utilizing the theoretical impulses of scholars such as Horst and Ingrid Daemmrich, Margaret Archer, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ibrahim Taha, among others, Lewis forges a new and productive path in Moricz scholarship, while also making his oeuvre accessible to a global audience. Any reader with an interest in Hungarian and Central European narrative will find this study enormously useful for the revelations it brings regarding Moricz's poignant and brilliant critique of the corrosive influence of commodification and greed on human agency in modern society. "Informed by theory and grounded in a critical understanding of Hungarian social history in the first half of the twentieth century, Lewis's engaging study of the realist novels of Zsigmond Moricz compels readers to think in new ways about questions of human agency amongst Hungary's lower and middle classes as this played out against the backdrop of capitalist transformation and pronounced social conflicts and injustices in the decades leading up to World War II. Skillfully structured around succinct analyses of seven of Moricz's key texts, Lewis's book addresses a sizable gap in the English-language scholarship on one of Hungary's greatest writers, and will be a welcome addition to the libraries of literary scholars and social and intellectual historians alike." -Steven Jobbitt, Associate Professor of Central and Eastern European History, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Canada

This autobiographical narrative provides a unique personal account of the life of a Volga German under the Bolshevik Revolution and subsequent famine, agricultural collectivization, and Stalinist regime with its persecution of minorities including ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union. The fact that its author, master miller Heinrich Neuwirt (1902-1953), survived as long as he did is a testimony to the resourcefulness, determination to survive, and capacity to endure hardship he evinced as he was repeatedly ensnared in Stalin's net, imprisoned, enslaved, and finally sent to the Russian front in a penal army. Neuwirt only managed to produce his account as a result of finding refuge in West Germany after the war, and although the manuscript made it to Volga German relatives in the United States, nothing came of publication efforts since it was written in German. The value of this manuscript lies in its first-person documentation of Volga German life under Stalin. German professor and literary scholar Virginia L. Lewis has rendered Neuwirt's original German account into faithful English translation.

Gustav Meyrink (1868-1932), best known as the author of The Golem (1915), experimented with the occult in a time rife with occult experimentation. As a seeker of esoteric truth, he practiced and wrote about elements of Western Esotericism-alternative religious movements that pursued methods of tapping into secret spiritual wisdom that helped define the age. In doing so, Meyrink developed his own theories of salvation, which featured yoga as a means to open the door to supernatural and paranormal experience. In this way, his life, as well as his fiction, exemplifies liminality, existence on the margins. The core symbol of this liminal experience is the somnambulist: a figure existing between material and spiritual states of consciousness, having access to both yet belonging to neither. His oeuvre features characters entering trances, wandering the borders between "waking" and "metaphysical" worlds, gaining access to secret truths, and realizing salvation via a unio mystica. Meyrink, therefore, has much to say about the cultural climate of the fin de siecle: by viewing the turn of the twentieth century as a time defined by searches for certitude, by locating Western Esotericism as a meaningful movement of the age, by situating Meyrink on the periphery of social and spiritual spheres, and by identifying the sleepwalker as a seminal figure of the period as well as in Meyrink's work, this study echoes Meyrink's own attempts to find lucidity in the ambiguity of somnambulism.