Images of Armenians in Hungarian Literature

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
The Armenian ethnic group appears on the linguistic landscape of Transylvania and of the Carpathian Basin in the 17th century when Mihály Apafi (1632–1690), Prince of Transylvania allows this ethnic group, having fled from the East across Moldavia, to settle in the principality. This paper tries to answer the question regarding how the Armenian, as an ethnotype, emerges in the Hungarian common consciousness and, within this, what kind of ethnic and cultural Armenian-related images of alterity the Hungarian literature has produced. My research is mainly conduct on a Hungarian literary corpus, starting from the 19th to the 21st century. After a brief examination of this corpus I draw conclusions regarding the variations of the stereotypical Armenian hetero-image.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Zsuzsanna Ajtony is senior lecturer at the Department of Humanities, Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, Miercurea Ciuc, Romania, where she teaches courses in linguistics (syntax, pragmatics, lexicology). She received her PhD in Philology in 2011 at the University of Bucharest and in 2012 she published her dissertation in the volume Britain and Britishness in G. B. Shaw’s Plays – a Linguistic Perspective. She has published several articles and book chapters on the linguistic representation of ethnicity and identity both in Romania and abroad. Her main areas of interest cover the interdisciplinary field of language and literature, including the areas of imagology and translations studies. She is co-editor of the volume Discourse of Space (published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013) and editor of the journal Acta Universitatis Sapientiae – Philologica.