CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2009
| Author | Staley, Maxwell Reed |
|---|---|
| Title | The First Nyugat Generation and the Politics of Modern Literature: Budapest, 1900-1918 |
| Summary | This thesis investigates the connections between arts and politics in fin-de-siècle Hungary, as expressed in the writings of the First Nyugat Generation. Various elements of the cultural debate in which the Nyugat writers participated can illustrate the complexities of this relationship. These are the debate over the aesthetics of national literature, the urban-versus-rural discourse, and the definition of the national community. Through close reading of the Nyugat group’s writings on these topics, two themes are explored, relating to the ambivalence with which the Nyugat writers implemented their project of westernizing Hungarian culture. The first is the dominant presence of the nationalist discourse within an ostensibly cosmopolitan endeavor. This fits in with a general artistic trend of Hungarian modernism, and can be explained with reference to the ambiguous position of Hungary within Europe and the subsequent complexities present in the national discourse. A second theme is the fragmentation of identity, and the contradictory impulses present in the literature. Endre Ady, the greatest poet of the group, embodied these contradictions and thus expressed the available options to Hungarian society through his poetic personality. |
| Supervisor | Gyani, Gabor; Riedl, Matthias |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2009/staley_maxwell.pdf |
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