CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Drosztmér, Ágnes |
|---|---|
| Title | Images of Distance and Closeness: The Ottomans in Sixteenth-Century Hungarian Vernacular Poetry |
| Summary | The dissertation is an analysis of references concerning the presence and campaigns of the Ottoman Empire in vernacular Hungarian literary discourses in the sixteenth century. The “Turks” often appeared in various forums of cultural discourse and public discussion as the archetypes of enemy, nourished by religious texts (both Protestant and Catholic) and historiographical sources. At the same time, descriptions of campaigns of the constantly expanding Ottoman Empire provided new kinds of information and experience. This novel experience resulted in novel perceptions. The representations of the Ottomans varied along several axes: they were dependent on the cultural and social context; on the author who created or mediated the image, on the audience for whom the image was made; and on the depicted subject. The goal of the dissertation is to recover the features, similarities and differences presented by different authors for different audiences. Due to the transformations of language and literacy, and to other developments, such as the spread of the printing press and Protestantism, the second half of the sixteenth century corresponds to the period in Hungarian cultural history when vernacular literature was established in written form and its specific forms and rules evolved. The analysis of representational patterns of Ottomans and their contextualization has the potential to help reconstruct this process. The research maps traditions followed and representational patterns created in sixteenth-century Hungarian poetry produced under the Ottoman rule. I attempt to answer the question to what extent the literature of the era follows traditional patterns of depicting the Ottomans or to what extent it created new ones. The investigation also concerns various social and cultural aspects of language, and the progress of transition from orality into written culture, that was both the result and the means of reflecting decisive events of the era. |
| Supervisor | Marcell Sebők, György Endre Szőnyi |
| Department | Medieval Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/drosztmer_agnes.pdf |
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