CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Szélpál, Lívia Klára |
|---|---|
| Title | A TALE OF TWO HUNGARIAN CITIES: The Making and Reading of Modern Debrecen and Szeged, 1850-1914 |
| Summary | This dissertation is a tale of two cities and envisages the urban development of two towns, Debrecen and Szeged, alongside their place in the Hungarian urban network in the period between 1850 and 1914. I analyzed the factors that influenced the visual and textual images of these two cities in the second half of the 19th century and investigated the representation and urban identity of these two Hungarian towns, their consequent development in given geo-political contexts, and their historiographical features in a comparative way. My approach is complemented by an investigation of the idiosyncratic cultural and social history of these urban areas. This research is a rather unconventional work of urban history and an interdisciplinary project. In this work, urban history meets issues related to architecture, sociology, cultural history, literature and ethnography since A Tale of Two Hungarian Cities aims to map the paradigms of change within the methodology of urban history by offering an interdisciplinary analysis of both towns. I focus on the (self) representation of each city, a manner of representation which gains increased importance by a transformation from the narrated city to the cultural translatability of the narrating city. There is a longstanding tradition of urban historical research in the Hungarian historiographical tradition. However, there are still a number of methodological questions, which are waiting to be explored, among them the comparative analysis of provincial cities. This dissertation maps the histories of Debrecen and Szeged in a less traditional way: besides analyzing the economic and social histories of the two towns, I focus on their cultural histories (and their development) and on the identity-making processes in these towns, especially as presented in their local newspapers. I analyze the representation of these cities in three areas: 1. urban planning and architecture; 2. local press, and 3. associational life. It is through these foci that I show how Debrecen and Szeged that had been only emerging provincial towns took off after the Compromise of 1867, and developed through different trajectories, especially after the Great Flood of 1879 in Szeged. I argue that their interurban competition played a formative role in their development. |
| Supervisor | Bodnár, Judit |
| Department | History PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/szelpal_livia.pdf |
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