Cultural Studies paper by Kádár, Judit
Ways of Losing Identity: Emigre Women Writers from the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy
Type of Abstract (select):Abstract (max. 250 words):
The period of soaring economic prosperity after 1867 brought about the birth of modern women's literature in the eastern part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy too.
Female descendants of impoverished noble or middle-class families that had been unable to adapt to capitalism, young girls who were resolute to earn a living by writing moved to the Hungarian capital city even from the remotest regions.
Almost two-thirds of these future intellectuals arrived from the provinces, among them Anna Tutsek, who quitting her Transylvanian birthplace, Kolozsvár (Cluj), settled down in Budapest in the 1890s, or Margit Kaffka who moved to the capital from a region located to the west of Transylvania in 1902.
For many, it was the dissolution of the Monarchy that led to their emigration: one of the most popular writers of the interwar period, Lola Réz Kosáryné left her native land, the Selmecbánya (Banska Stiavnica) region in the West Carpathians to emigrate from the new state of Czechoslovakia to Hungary in 1919.
By analysing the writings of these women writers, the aim of this paper on Hungarian - Eastern-European women's social history is to examine how these immigrant writers reacted to the loss of cultural and social norms that had inevitably occurred to them, to investigate whether they identified this loss of identity as deprivation or having been convinced of the existence of an indivisible unitary Hungarian nation and culture they avoided/rejected self-reflexion.
Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Judit Kádár, who received her Ph.D. in Hungarian Literature at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, teaches American Literature and Twentieth-Century British prose in the English Department of the University of West-Hungary in Szombathely. Her main field of research is nineteenth and twentieth century Hungarian women writers, and she also regularly writes on contemporary American and British literature as a correspondent for Magyar Narancs, a Hungarian political and cultural weekly. She has published an anthology of twentieth century Hungarian women poets (Térdig születésben, halálban), a collection of critical essays (Royal Flush), and a monograph on pre-World War II Hungarian women writers (Engedelmes lázadók).