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

  Róbert Takács

  Views:

  87

  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)

• Royall Tyler in Hungary: An American of the League of Nations and Hungarian Reconstruction Efforts, 1924–1938

  Zoltán Peterecz

  Views:

  164

  American-Hungarian relations were rarely closer on the personal level than in the interwar years. Although the United States followed the path of political and diplomatic isolation from Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, and its absence in the League of Nations was conspicuous, in the financial and economic realm it remained more active, and many Americans worked in the various reconstruction projects across Europe either in their private capacities or under the auspices of the League. Royall Tyler was one such person who spent the larger part of the 1920s and 1930s in Hungary. Since the start of the financial reconstruction of Hungary in 1924, Tyler was a constant participant in Hungarian financial life, a contact between the Hungarian government and the League of Nations, and a sharp observer of events throughout the years he spent in Hungary and Europe. This essay focuses on his activities concerning Hungary’s financial and economic reconstruction and recovery. (ZP)

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

  Tibor Glant

  Views:

  139

  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)

• Travel Writing and the Integration of East-Central Europe: John Paget’s Hungary and Transylvania

  Márta Pellérdi

  Views:

  217

  John Paget’s travelogue from 1839, Hungary and Transylvania; with Remarks on their Condition, Social, Political, and Economical, makes a clear distinction between the Kingdom of Hungary and the Principality of Transylvania, both under Austrian rule at the time, and the rest of Eastern Europe. In terms of the variety and depth of the descriptions of the social, political, and economic conditions in the East-CentralEuropean country and province, Paget’s comprehensive and objective text stands out from the travelogues written about the region in the nineteenth century. This essay demonstrates that Hungary and Transylvania reveals the author’s intention to rediscover the history and culture of a neglected European nation who have attempted for centuries, successfully, and often unsuccessfully, to orient their politics toward the West rather than the East. It suggests that despite the occasional colonial discourse, Paget’s travelogue is an attempt to economically, politically, and culturally promote the integration of Hungary and Transylvania into the more “civilized” West. (MP)

• “And Now for the Rest of the Story”: The ITT and Vogeler/Sanders Case Revisited

  Margaret M. Manchester

  Views:

  135

  Robert A. Vogeler, an American businessman, served seventeen months in a Hungarian prison after being found guilty of espionage and economic sabotage. During his detainment and imprisonment, the US government used diplomatic and economic pressure to try to secure his release. Lucille Vogeler, a socialite, used personal diplomacy, the media, and contacts with underworld figures in Austria to pressure the US and Hungarian governments to release her husband. After their return to the US in 1951, the Vogelers became prominent critics of the Truman Administration’s policy of containment and urged their audiences, including many members of the US Congress, to wage a more aggressive campaign to defeat communism. Their experiences illustrate the ways in which the American business community and individual citizens contributed to the formulation of US Cold War policies. The case also illustrates the many ways in which media and public pressure could influence US foreign policy during the early Cold War years. (MMM)

• Killing the Canard: Saint Stephen’s Crown, Nixon, Budapest, and the Hungarian Lobby

  Máté Gergely Balogh

  Views:

  104

  With the question of the return of the Holy Crown in the focus, the essay describes how certain leaders of the Hungarian-American community attempted to influence American foreign policy towards Hungary during the détente period. Whereas certain members of the Nixon and Ford administrations, as well as the State Department, had already considered returning the Crown to the People’s Republic of Hungary, many of the émigré groups were strongly opposed to this action, and voiced their protest whenever speculations surfaced in the press. With the help of certain American and Hungarian-American politicians in Congress as well as in the Republican Party, the decision to return the Crown could be presented as potentially too risky politically and postponed during the Nixon and the Ford administrations. But with the election of President Carter, the Hungarian-American groups seem to have lost their leverage, and as soon as the political decision was made they could no longer prevent the return. (MGB)

• The Female Gentleman and the Myth of Englishness in the Detective Novels of Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham

  Renáta Zsámba

  Views:

  424

  Golden Age detective fiction by women offers insights into the competing gender ideologies of the 1930s and early 1940s. The female protagonist these novels delineate is called “the female gentleman” by Melissa Schaub, who describes her as the detective’s equal based on her intellectual abilities and independence. Although the female gentleman seems a revolutionary figure as she is forward-looking in gender politics, her strong belief in class hierarchy, her Victorian morals and relationship with the gentleman detective relocate her in the heritage of the English pastoral. This essay focuses on the female gentleman as a bridge figure whose marriage to the detective not only restores him to his masculinity but also portrays the woman embedded in the pastoral idyll of the English landscape. Her decision to accept traditional femininity reinforces the female gentleman’s role in the recreation of the stability and security of pre-war England. (RZs)

• Slum or Arcadia? Hungary as “Other Space” in Imre by Edward Prime-Stevenson

  Zsolt Bojti

  Views:

  91

  This essay substantiates the reasons why Edward Prime-Stevenson’s novelette, Imre (1906), which is considered to be the first openly gay novel in English with a happy ending, is set in an imaginary Budapest called Szent-Istvánhely. The paper suggests that there is a list of references to Hungary in late-Victorian gay literature that Prime-Stevenson builds upon. Another common element in these works is that the location, more specifically, the city landscape, plays an important role that maps the gay city and reflects on the English slumming culture in the East End. The paper substantiates the claim that Prime-Stevenson’s fictional Budapest functions as a Foucauldian heterotopias, which can juxtapose and reconcile oppositions coming from associations with Western and Eastern cultures, the slum and an Arcadia, respectively. (ZsB)

• Disruptive Domesticity in Shakespearean Drama

  Zita Turi

  Views:

  117

  Book review:

  Whipday, Emma. Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies: Violence in the Early Modern Home. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019. 262 pages. ISBN 9781108474030. Pbk. £29.99

• What Makes the Olfactif of Victorian Literature?

  Zsolt Bojti

  Views:

  61

  Book review:

  Maxwell, Catherine. Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017. xviii + 361 pages. ISBN 978-0-19-870175-0. Hb. £30.00.

• “Outsider”: The Influence of Migration Experience on the Life and Work of Hungarian-Canadian Songwriter B.B. Gábor

  Victor Kennedy

  Kristian Kolar

  Neža Bojnec Naterer

  Views:

  173

  This paper examines the life and work of Gábor Hegedűs, whose family escaped from the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956, and settled in Toronto, Canada. Under the stage name B.B. Gábor, he wrote and released several successful songs and albums, many of which drew on his experience as a refugee, and were broadcast around the world, as well as in Canada. His most popular songs were satiric commentaries on culture and politics, comparing life in the USSR and in Canada. These were the themes that drew the most attention from audiences and critics, and earned them international airplay, most notably on Radio Free Europe. His difficulties coping with life as a refugee and as an immigrant to Canada resulted in personal tragedy, yet his ability to express these difficulties in his songs left a lasting legacy in both Canada and his native Hungary. (VK; KK; NBN)

• Language and the Continental Congress: Language Policy Issues in the Founding Documents of the United States from 1774 to 1789

  Sándor Czeglédi

  Views:

  85

  Although neither the first nor the second constitution of the United States contains any references to the role of languages in the process of nation-building, a few language-related issues emerged from time to time during the early congressional debates and deliberations. These sporadic instances mostly framed the English language as a “pragmatic instrument” rather than a “national ideological symbol.” Consequently, no serious attempts were made either to officially adopt it as the majority language or to enhance its societal role and capacity in identity formation by legislative fiat. The apocryphal accounts of disestablishing English and installing, for example, French, German, or Latin as the de jure official language after the American Revolution probably belong to the realm of language policy myths. Drawing on key legislative documents during the critical years of the founding of the United States and employing language policy classification schemes based on the works of Anderson, Wiley, and Ruiz, the essay proposes a comprehensive overview of how, when, and in what contexts language-related references appeared. (SCz)

• Immigrant Memories of Healing: Textual and Pictorial Images in Erika Gottlieb’s Becoming My Mother’s Daughter

  Mária Palla

  Views:

  110

  Erika Gottlieb’s narrative is a transgenerational family memoir, a search for identity, and also the testimony of the protagonist Eva Steinbach, the thinly disguised authorial self, a child survivor of the Holocaust in Hungary, which provides a larger historical perspective for the personal narrative written in Canada. The satisfactory completion of the tasks involved in these three strands of Gottlieb’s life writing depends on how successfully memories can be preserved without allowing them to paralyze the remembering subject. Since these three themes are inseparable from each other, they can only result in self-understanding and healing for the author/protagonist if they evolve together. At the same time, Gottlieb’s narrative is intricately linked to her artwork, which calls for an intermedial discussion of the book to reveal how the graphic images further enhance the protagonist’s struggle to comprehend herself. While the multi-layered text is constructed in a non-linear structure, the sketches and paintings incorporated in it are employed to fulfill various functions. They serve both as illustrations of characters and locations at times, while on other occasions they are made to serve as structural devices. When describing or representing existing artwork, the text also turns into ekphrastic writing at certain points, thus multiplying the interpretative possibilities opened up and the aesthetic impressions created. (MP)

• “What stood in the Post Office / With Pearse and Connolly?”: Heroism, Timeliness, and Timelessness in Some of Yeats’s Plays

  Edit Bődy

  Views:

  271

  The essay discusses a frequently recurring type of hero found in William Butler Yeats’s plays, including the last one, The Death of Cuchulain (1939). This hero-figure occurs quite early in Yeats’s oeuvre: The Green Helmet (1910), for example, already focuses on the definition of hero and heroism and different versions of this hero type also occur in other plays, such as The King’s Threshold (1904) and The Player Queen (1922). In dramas, where this motif plays an important role, his source is in part Nietzsche’s tragic hero completed with other features. As early as The Green Helmet, Yeats defines what makes a hero: apart from bravery, also gaiety, a kind of ecstasy is needed. Cuchulain’s goal to become the hero, smiling even in the shadow of death, is achieved in Yeats’s last play, and the Cuchulain-image emerging from the Anima Mundi binds past and present. (EB)

• Aging and Death in Edward Albee’s The Sandbox and Tennessee Williams’s The Milktrain Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore

  Réka M. Cristian

  Views:

  453

  With focus on the tropes of aging and death in Edward Albee’s The Sandbox (1960) and Tennessee Williams’s The Milktrain Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963), the essay investigates the negotiation of the protagonists’ identity through specters of age and the means of encountering death, and it analyzes the representation of the dramas’ senior citizens with special regard to the ways in which these characters challenge mainstream cultural constructions of aging. On their deathbed, both Albee’s and Williams’s protagonists are reconnecting with their pasts in idiosyncratic ways: they build up a conscious “age autobiography” (Margaret Morgenroth Gulette) in an inventory of events and feelings assessing a complete(d) life and achieve an “agewise” (Gulette) identity that comes full circle in the very moment of grace. The characters who escort these two elderly women on their last journey reconceptualize the sense of intimacy between people. The dialogic potential of their empathy, care, and unconditional support during the end-game of the protagonists accommodates difference in various contexts by blurring the boundary between the old and the young as well as the one between men and women, because death has neither age nor gender. Thus, these intergenerational exchanges help elder characters’ agewise enterprises into the unknown gain a cathartic sense of freedom. (RMC)

• “Holding so Much of the Mind of Ireland” and Writing Modernist Drama: Celebratory Thoughts on the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of John Millington Synge

  Mária Kurdi

  Views:

  181

  Celebratory Thoughts on the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of John Millington Synge

• Parkinson’s Law and an Ironic Rhetoric of Management

  Attila Sebestyén

  Views:

  133

  Cyril Northcote Parkinson, British historian, fiction writer, and, so to say, management guru, in Parkinson’s Law created his own successful way of critiquing organizational bureaucratization. Parkinson’s work falls under the Burkean category of “literature for use,” in which affectivity becomes guaranteed by the peculiarity of irony. As Wayne C. Booth suggested, even in the case of “stable irony” there may often be some possibility of further considerations (that is, the factor of uncertainty), despite all the efforts to rhetorically control this type of irony. Booth, however, also noted that a paradoxical situation may arise in which “unstable” irony, intended to be open-ended, becomes capable of creating possibilities for referential reading and practical application. Thus, Parkinson’s Law provides the duality of entertainment through its satire and the seriousness of its management thoughts (for instance, the relationship of work and time, work and headcount, workforce selection methods, and the extension of committees or departments). These two aspects, constantly intermingling, are examined through the rhetoric of irony working in Parkinson’s Law and the practical influences it may exert. (AS)

• Larkin’s Poetics

  Attila Dósa

  Views:

  47

  Book review:

  Rácz, István. Philip Larkin’s Poetics: Theory and Practice of an English Post-War Poet. Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi. 2016. 235 pages. ISBN 978-90-04-31106-0. Hb. €76.00.

• Utopian Horizons in Hungary

  Joachim Fischer

  Views:

  76

  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.

• Iterations of Silence

  Leila Pintér

  Views:

  148

  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.

• Advancing the Discourse on Travel Writing

  Balázs Venkovits

  Views:

  57

  Book review:

  Kuehn, Julia, and Paul Smethurst, eds. New Directions in Travel Writing Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 325 pages. ISBN 978 1 137 45757 8. Hb. $90.

• The Fabulous Adventures of Alice with Fashion, Science, and Pinocchio

  Anna Kérchy

  Views:

  369

  The three scholarly monographs published between 2017 and 2020 by Laura White, Laura Tosi and Peter Hunt, and Kiera Vaclavik, are recent contributions to Lewis Carroll scholarship. They belong to what Michael Heyman calls “the sense school” of nonsense literary criticism in so far as they attribute a specific agenda, a systematic structure, a decipherable message, and a homogenised reading to the Alice tales (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass). Each re-explores a well-known children’s classic from fresh new perspectives by relying on interdisciplinary methodologies, mingling the literary historical approach with insights of critical fashion studies, evolutionary biology, and comparative cross-cultural analysis (translation studies), respectively. Like adaptations, these critical theoretical interpretations of the Alice books are in a constant dialogue with one another within a Genettian transtextual network of multimodal narratives.

• Reproduction and the Female Body in Anne Sexton’s Poetry

  Boglárka Kiss

  Views:

  523

  The essay focuses on two representative examples of Anne Sexton’s poems about reproduction, “In Celebration of My Uterus” and “The Abortion.” Contrary to most previous analyses which have foregrounded Sexton’s concern with personal identity, the paper claims that Sexton positions personal experience in the wider framework of cultural and social discourses. “In Celebration of My Uterus” explores the experience of the vitality of the speaker’s reproductive organ in the context of kinship with women in other geopolitical locations, also addressing how childbearing is implicated in processes of national economic production. “The Abortion” situates the termination of a pregnancy in the context of the Pennsylvanian landscape, raising questions regarding the embeddedness of the natural landscape in processes of human economic production, as well as the financial implications of the termination of a pregnancy. While questions of self-identity, personal boundaries, and physical experiences are undoubtedly central to “The Abortion” and “In Celebration of My Uterus,” they also attest to Sexton’s concern with the experience of the individual in their wider social context.  (BK)

• Novel Approaches to Understanding and Conceptualizing Diaspora

  Éva Pataki

  Views:

  101

  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.

• Miles Franklin’s Growing Voice: Revisiting My Brilliant Career

  Gabriella T. Espák

  Views:

  126

  Rather than any of her more mature writing, Miles Franklin’s debut romance, My Brilliant Career, has been cemented into the canon of Australian literary nationalism. The novel received ambivalent immediate responses upon its publication in 1901 for its unflattering representation of the author’s kin and society. Subsequent criticism soon accepted Franklin’s oeuvre as part of the dominant male discourse of late nineteenth-century Australia, but after the 1970s her writing came under new scrutiny from a feminist aspect. Recently, she has been placed in a long tradition of female writing and discussed for gendered ventures. Nonetheless, however dedicated a feminist Franklin later became, she did not yet search for women’s greater self-realization in her debut but for her own identity and place in the world as an adolescent. This article argues that although Franklin’s classic has become an icon of both nationalist and feminist literature, the dichotomy of these readings can best be appeased through the adolescent ramps of its protagonist. It is an adolescent novel, in which a growing voice argues with her superiors, peers, and self, thereby exploring her authorial, gendered, and national identity. (GTE)