Hungarian Literature of Our Century in Pictures: From Széchenyi's Rise to the Compromise

Sándor EndrődiProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0

Word count: 468K words
Chapters: 47

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Századunk magyar irodalma képekben: Széchenyi föllépésétől a kiegyezésig by EndrődiAuthor: Endrődi, Sándor, 1850-1920,Language: Hungarian, Class: PH: Language and Literatures: Finno-Ugrian and Basque languages and literatures, Release Date: Feb 8, 2013

Editor's review

This is a richly illustrated survey of Hungarian literary history by the Hungarian writer and literary historian Sándor Endrődi, spanning the period from Széchenyi's emergence to the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. The word "képekben" in the title signals that portraits, book illustrations, and scene images accompany the text, allowing the course of literature to be seen in relation to political and social change. Written in Hungarian and belonging to the late nineteenth-century tradition of literary history, the narrative carries the perspective and tastes of the author's era and is suitable as primary material for understanding literary life during the Hungarian national revival. For researchers, it offers a way to observe how early literary history used images to construct a canon; general readers, however, need some knowledge of Hungarian and of the historical background to enter it smoothly. The electronic edition preserves the public-domain original and is better browsed by topic than read straight through.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Advanced students and researchers studying Hungarian or the literary history of Central and Eastern Europe who need primary literary-historical texts
Readers of history and culture interested in the nineteenth-century Hungarian national revival and the literary public sphere
Those studying how images participate in the construction of a literary canon, in book history, and in visual culture

Not a good fit for

General readers with no Hungarian who can rely only on Chinese translations
Beginners expecting a systematic literary history within a modern scholarly framework, with clear periodization and annotation

Reading tips

Begin with the table of contents and illustration captions, and divide the reading into sections according to the political milestones from the Széchenyi era to the Compromise period
Compare the book's assessments of figures with later Hungarian literary histories, noting the author's biases and selection of material
Choose chapters on writers of interest for close reading, and use historical background materials from the same period to understand the context

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Can someone who does not know Hungarian read this book?

It is very difficult to read directly. The main text is in Hungarian and belongs to the late nineteenth-century style of literary history; its vocabulary and syntax are also remote for modern learners. Without Hungarian, one can only learn about its content and illustrations indirectly through translations or research literature.

What does "képekben" in the title mean?

It means "in pictures," indicating that the book includes images to support the narrative of literary history. These images include portraits and book illustrations and are important clues for understanding how the author shaped the literary canon; they are worth reading alongside the text.

Is the book's periodization of literary history reliable?

It reflects the view of literary history of the author's time and can be consulted as material for the history of scholarship, but it should not be taken as modern standard periodization. When using it, one should understand the limitations of late nineteenth-century Hungarian literary-historical writing and compare it with contemporary research.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Sándor Endrődi Author · Hungarian · 1850–1920

Sándor Endrődi (1850–1920) was a Hungarian poet and writer, born on 16 January 1850 in Veszprém and died on 7 November 1920 in Budapest. He studied in Berlin and Leipzig and later worked as a newspaper and journal editor; in 1899 he was elected a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His poetry was widely popular around the turn of the twentieth century, and he also devoted himself to research on Petőfi. He compiled collections of Hungarian folk songs and ballads, including Magyar népdalok and Magyar népballadák, and wrote the literary-historical work Századunk magyar irodalma képekben: Széchenyi föllépésétől a kiegyezésig. Three of his works are held in the collection. Public information is limited; his contribution lies chiefly in the editing of folk song collections and in literary history.