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• Preserving Past Tastes

  Eszter Ureczky

  Views:

  53

  Book review:

  Wall, Wendy. Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2016. 328 pages. ISBN 9780812247589. $69.95.

• Through A Xenophobic Lens: Degeneration Theory in W. Christy Cabanne’s Martyrs of the Alamo

  Susan Savage Lee

  Tamas Z. Csabafi

  Views:

  142

  At the turn of the twentieth century, social theories developed in both the U.S. and Europe suggested that those at the top, or those most well endowed with good genetics, would stay that way, while those with poor genetics had little hope of changing their circumstances.  Degeneration theory, as this concept was called when it took root in the United States from the late 1890s, before it had evolved to formally become eugenics in the 1910s, and beyond. While eugenics offices opened in Berlin in 1905, in England in 1907-08, and in the United States in 1910, there were many forms of it, including degeneration theory. What bound all the theories together was the notion of biology and heredity.

              Westerns like Martyrs of the Alamo became a vehicle to explore these concerns because they inundated everyday Americans with illustrations of national identity. Films like these often mixed fantasy with ideology. This is clearly evident in W. Christy Cabanne’s anti-Mexican sentiment in Martyrs of the Alamo. Examining Cabanne’s film through the lens of degeneracy theory provides a greater understanding of American social concerns in the 1910s. These concerns, characterized by xenophobic depictions of immigrants, particularly Mexicans, culminated in the linking of immigrant bodies and disease with heredity and genetics, namely through theories of degeneration . Cabanne’s Martyrs of the Alamo suggests, through the reproduction of the conflict surrounding the Alamo Mission, that the alternative to “race suicide” is a fantasy of American heroism, collectivism, and cultural exclusion. (SS and TZCS)

• A Heart’s Pledge in Metaerotopoetics

  Imre Olivér Horváth

  Views:

  66

  Book review:

  Gray, Erik. The Art of Love Poetry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018. 210 pages. ISBN 978-0-19-875297-4. Hb. £50.00.

• The Plays of Enda Walsh: An Interim Report

  Christopher Murray

  Views:

  282

  Ever since Disco Pigs hit the headlines at the Edinburgh Festival in 1996, Enda Walsh has achieved major success at home, on the Irish stage, and worldwide. This essay acknowledges that the body of his work to date, comprising nineteen plays plus collaborations in musicals and operas, still represents work in progress and that it is not feasible yet to provide anything like a definitive assessment or interpretation. It is argued, nevertheless, that the work may be situated within the Irish dramatic tradition and contemporary modes of performance. While Walsh seeks always to entertain through meta-theatre, his plays owe much not only to Beckett but also to youth theatre, especially to the style of Passion Machine, to story-telling techniques, and to clowning, farce, and rock music. Certain serious themes recur, such as alienation, private versus public space, and death, which place Walsh in a category beyond “just play.” As scriptwriter for David Bowie’s last show, Lazarus, staged in New York in December 2015, he may be moving towards a synthesizing of ideas, style, and theme, thus moving collaboration to a new level. (CM)

• “If the world is dystopic, why fear an apocalypse?”

  Zsófia Novák

  Views:

  173

  Book review:

  MacCormack, Patricia. The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 224 pages. ISBN 9781350081093. E-book. £15.83.

• Surveil and Let Surveil

  Barnabás Baranyi

  Views:

  51

  Book review:

  Flynn, Susan, and Antonia McKay, eds. Spaces of Surveillance: States and Selves. London: Palgrave, 2017. 278 pages. ISBN 9783319490847. Hb. $139.99.

• Orson Scott Card’s Speculative Fictions: Blending Science Fiction and Fantasy

  W. A. Senior

  Views:

  116

  A prolific author, Orson Scott Card has written works that encompass a range of genres including a large body of commentary, Mormon drama, science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and often melds elements of one into another. In particular, as John Clute notes, “a ‘feel’ of fantasy pervades much of his s[cience] f[iction] work.” In fictions such as Enders Game, Treason, and Wyrms, and stories like “The Originist,” his tribute to Asimov’s Second Foundation, he employs traditional elements of fantasy: its language in references to wizards, dragons, magic, and such characters as dwelfs, a portmanteau of “elf” and “dwarf”; the episodic quest narrative of escalating perils undertaken by the protagonist, who moves from isolation to community; and the conventional, often medieval, fantasyscape of fabulous forests, rivers, and mountains. Through such a strategy Card establishes a heightened significance to human experiences that both genres address, and opens another portal to the sense of wonder that informs each. (WAS)

• Hollywood Ascendant: American Films in Hungary in the 1970s

  Róbert Takács

  Views:

  100

  Hungarian cultural policy makers denied Hungarian viewers access to American films between 1949 and 1956. Hollywood movies were publicly shown again behind the Iron Curtain from 1957 in spite of hostile American–Hungarian bilateral relations after the crushing of the Revolution of 1956. The de-Stalinized cultural policy of Hungary allowed for one third of the films released in Hungarian cinemas to come from capitalist countries. In the 1970s the United States became the largest non-socialist film exporter to Hungary and Hollywood export “sky-rocketed” at the end of the decade. The annual purchase of thirteen to twenty-nine American films still made it possible to apply ideological filters; however, only a part of the films released in Hungary could be regarded as useful in representing negative social trends in the United States. The majority of Hollywood movies screened in Hungary should rather be labeled as entertaining, and these served leisure on one hand and financial considerations on the other. Entertainment was recognized as a legitimate demand of the public after 1956 and the program of the cinemas had to be supplemented from Western sources. In the 1970s Hollywood became the number one Western movie entertainer in communist Hungary. The narrowing budgetary sources of cultural policy and the need for self-financing also paved the way for this tendency. (RT)

• Experiments with Realism in Irish Language Short Stories by Daithí Ó Muirí

  Sorcha de Brún

  Views:

  138

  Relying on Joseph McMinn’s statement that the connection between realist and non-realist fiction is not a hierarchical relationship, this essay maintains that realism in Irish language fiction is, and has always been, an energizing force for experimentation. This is nowhere more evident than in the work of writer Daithí Ó Muirí (1954-), a native English speaker now residing in an Irish speaking area in Ireland. Much of Ó Muirí’s work is experimental due to his use of allegory and fantasy, yet many of the stories remain rooted in the realities of the world, particularly in his representations of masculinities and in works concerning the impact of war, violence, and displacement on men’s lives. The essay examines Ó Muirí’s first three collections, Seacht Lá na Díleann (1998), Cogaí (2002), and Uaigheanna agus Scéalta Eile (2002), in which he explores subjects that are classically realistic: war, death, religion, and relationships between men and women. The essay explores how Ó Muirí’s work often combines realism and magic realism, and shows that Ó Muirí’s fiction provides a fresh if somewhat bleak narrative of 21^st century realism in Irish language prose fiction.

• Shifting Perspectives in Adaptations

  Emma Bálint

  Views:

  58

  Book review:

  Grossman, Julie. Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny: Adaptation and ElasTEXTity. Adaptation and Visual Culture 1. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 228 pages. ISBN 978-1-137-54205-4. Hb. $99.00.

• Decolonizing the Second World

  Fanni Feldmann

  Views:

  59

  Book review:

  Tlostanova, Madina. Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art: Resistance and Re-existence. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. xi + 224 pages. ISBN 978-3-319-48444-0. Hb. €88.39.

• World Enough and Time

  W. A. Senior

  Views:

  97

  Book review:

  Morse, Donald E. It’s Time: A Mosaic Reflecting What Living in Time is Like. Debrecen: Debrecen UP, 2022. 326 pages. ISBN 978-963-615-004-4. Open Access E-book and Pbk. HUF 4,000.

• Nixon, Ford, Kissinger, and the Holy Crown of Hungary in Bilateral Relations

  Tibor Glant

  Views:

  146

  The Holy Crown of Hungary spent thirty-three years in American custody between the end of World War II and its repatriation in January 1978. Open hostility between the US, the leader of the Free World, and Hungary, a Soviet colony in the middle of Europe, prevented any discussion about its return between 1947 and 1970. The normalization of bilateral relations (1969-78) opened up new possibilities, and the Nixon White House considered the return of the Hungarian coronation regalia briefly in 1970-71. Spirited protests by Congressmen and East European immigrants convinced National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and President Nixon that they could lose more by returning the Crown than by keeping it in American custody (in Fort Knox, KY), so the issue was dropped. Yet the press continued to discuss the possibility of its return and the White House had to deny any such plans again and again. As normalization ground to a halt after 1973, Budapest exerted more and more pressure and the matter was on President Ford’s desk one last time in December 1976, right after he had lost the election. Ford accepted the advice of his foreign policy team and “sleeping dogs” were left alone. It was the next president who decided to “face the goulash hitting the fan” and the Holy Crown of Hungary and the assorted regalia were returned by the new Carter administration on January 6, 1978. (TG)

• The Memory of Land in Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints

  Katarína Havranová

  Views:

  121

  Chicana playwright Cherríe Moraga attributes healing power to memory, which has an important geographical dimension in her play Heroes and Saints (1994). The play dramatizes the suffering of a community of Mexican Americans in California, whose women and children are affected by toxic poisoning as a consequence of agriculture’s overt reliance on pesticides. Whereas critical discussions have dealt extensively with the representation of the body in the play, this study argues for the recognition that the land and the particular places the individual characters inhabit have a decisive impact on the formation of the body. The memory of the land—the Mexican homeland of the immigrant people and the lands of a transnational Latino imagination—is a transformative force in the play, which impels the community to recognize the need to stand up for their rights.

• Beyond the “Raked Gardens”: Female Identity in American Suburban Poetry

  Jiří Flajšar

  Views:

  159

  The article analyzes an overlooked aspect of American suburban poetry—the writing of American women poets who deal with the problem of how to represent female identity. Drawing on the existing criticism of women’s poetry, a comprehensive survey of the suburban poems by American women poets, from the 1940s to the 2000s, is provided. The article documents the various approaches that these poets adopt in order to explore identity while resisting the gender stereotypization in American suburbia. These approaches include either embracing the suburban ideal of domestic conformity or attempting to present women suburbanites who reject the socially prescribed roles forced upon them and develop new identities of their own. (JF)

• Dracula Addressing Old and New

  Ildikó Limpár

  Views:

  87

  Book review:

  Crişan, Marius-Mircea, ed. Dracula: An International Perspective. Palgrave Gothic. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. xi + 280 pages. ISBN 978-3-319-63365-7. Hb. $101.51.

• The Most Monstrous Kind of Art: Frankenfictions

  Ildikó Limpár

  Views:

  84

  Book review:

  de Bruin-Molé, Megen. Gothic Remixed: Monster Mashups and Frankenfictions in 21st-Century Culture. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. x + 264 pages. ISBN 978-1350103054. Hb. £76.50.

• Emotional Urban Spaces: Atmosphere, Fascination, and Phantasmagoria in Sunetra Gupta’s The Glassblower’s Breath (1993)

  Éva Pataki

  Views:

  67

  Investigating the literary representation of urban spaces and identities the essay untangles the complex psychological and emotional relationship between the heroine and her beloved and hated cities in Sunetra Gupta’s The Glassblower’s Breath (1993). Drawing on Gernot Böhme’s (1993) theory of the atmospheric qualities of space, Steve Pile’s psychogeographical approach to reading cities, Walter Benjamin’s concept of phantasmagoria, and various interpretations of fascination, it explores the creation of atmospheres in the novel and the role of fascination in the perception of London and Gupta’s female protagonist as phantasmagorias. I argue that—as urban imaginaries—the emotional fabric and atmosphere of the cities portrayed are as much created by their spaces and places, their inhabitants and visitors, as they are manifested and formulated in emotional states of being, whether real or fictional, phantasmagoric or imaginary. (ÉP)

• Migrants and Disaster Subcultures in the Late Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Reading of Octavia Butler’s Parable Novels

  Éva Federmayer

  Views:

  341

  Affected by a shocking concatenation of ecological, economic, and political disasters, black, white, and multiracial characters in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) seek to cope with apparently insurmountable difficulties. These Afrofuturist Parable novels render a disintegrating US society in the 2020s-2090s, which is torn by internal and external chaos: it shows visible signs of pandemonium involving the crisis of individual, communal, and ecological survival. This ecocritical reading seeks to explore how Butler’s novels make up the fictional tapestry of an evolving human risk narrative whose anthropogenic effects on the planet might threaten an “ecological holocaust” (Charles Brown) unless fundamental green changes spur radically alternative modes of thinking and living. Throughout this paper, I am interested in how Butler’s texts address and construct the interaction of the human and the non-human world to create a storyworld in which distinct characters operate not only according to the logic of the narrative in their local places and (semi)private/communal spaces, but also as distinct configurations of the Anthropocene, that is, as agents of a larger story of humans. (EF)

• Utopian Horizons in Hungary

  Joachim Fischer

  Views:

  79

  Book review:

  Czigányik, Zsolt, ed. Utopian Horizons: Ideology, Politics, Literature. Budapest, New York: Central European UP, 2017. viii + 256 pages. ISBN 978-963-386-181-3. Hb. Npr.

• Novel Approaches to Understanding and Conceptualizing Diaspora

  Éva Pataki

  Views:

  109

  Book review:

  Ilott, Sarah, Ana Cristina Mendes, and Lucinda Newns, eds. New Directions in Diaspora Studies: Cultural and Literary Approaches. London, New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018. xxxiii + 165 pages. ISBN 978-1-78660-516-0. Hb. £85.

• The Cultural and Intersectional Politics of Nomadism in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time

  Malou Kürpick

  Views:

  589

  Zadie Smith’s most recent novel, Swing Time (2016) continues her exploration of individual identity in relation to the broader social context by telling the story of an unnamed narrator and her childhood friend, Tracey, members of the second-generation British-Jamaican diaspora in London, whose cultural and racial hybridity positions them against hegemonic discourses in contemporary British society. The text vividly portrays the consequences of their deviance, particularly how the specific intersections of race, gender, and class they embody limit either their cultural or socio-economic agency, and impair their capacity to construct a sustainable identity. Since the desire to transcend bodily determination in performative ways is as crucial a dimension of the characters’ life journey as is the experience of the effects of socio-economic stratification arising out of intersectional difference, this essay explores the complex relationship between intersectional difference and agency in Swing Time through the double theoretical lens of Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic performative model of identity and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, arguing that Smith’s novel does not simply bear out Braidotti’s theory but rather interrogates it, especially its insufficient attention to the diverse and disempowering effects resulting from certain intersections of what Braidotti calls “variables” or “axes of differentiation.”  (MK)

• Iterations of Silence

  Leila Pintér

  Views:

  157

  Book review:

  Fadem, Maureen E. Ruprecht. Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019. 310 pages. ISBN 978-1-7936-0707-2. E-book. $115.

• Mapping the Potentials of Monster Studies

  Ildikó Limpár

  Views:

  145

  Book review:

  Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, ed. The Monster Theory Reader. University of Minnesota Press, 2020. ix + 560 pages + 33 b&w photos. ISBN 978-1-5179-0525-5. $35.00. Pbk.

• From Achilles’s Tent to a San Francisco Restaurant: Imaginations of the Closet in Thom Gunn’s Poetry

  Imre Olivér Horváth

  Views:

  102

  This essay examines Thom Gunn’s key poems, chronologically mapping Ruth E. Fassinger’s model of gay and lesbian identity development onto it. Gunn’s poetry gradually changed in terms of how he addressed his homosexuality: whereas in his early work his sexual orientation was concealed, later it became increasingly visible, to the point of unambiguously referring to himself as “queer” in a poem from the 1980s. The poems discussed in this article—“The Wound” (1954), “The Secret Sharer” (1954), “The Corridor” (1957), “The Monster” (1961), “Bravery” (1967), “Behind the Mirror” (1976), and “Talbot Road” (1982)—address the split self of the speaker accompanied by spatial division. The poems with this leitmotif form a corpus characterized by a gradual change in terms of the rigidity of the division. Identifying the spatial division as the closet and the split self as the closeted subject, the article argues that Gunn’s coming out of the closet is a recurring poetic device deliberately developed throughout his oeuvre, which demonstrates his growth as an artist. (IOH)