Cultural Studies paper by Vasvári, Louise O.
Béla Zsolt's A királynő családja [The (Beauty) Queen's Family] (1932) In the Context of His Literary Oeuvre (Accepted)
Type of Abstract (select):Abstract (max. 250 words):
Zsolt Bela, a leftist bourgeois journalist, was also a prolific novelist and playwright, who in his literary work wrote sharp insider criticism of the pretentions of the Hungarian Jewish petite bourgeoisie. After the war his oeuvre totally fell out of favor and today he is known, if at all, for his 1946 Holocaust memoir, Kilenc koffer [Nine Suitcases]. In 1929 when Böske Simon, daughter of a provincial Jewish doctor, made headlines by winning the very first Miss Magyarország/Hungaria title, and later the Miss Europa title, Zsolt extolled her in the Magyar hirlap as representing the most perfect European beauty ideal in whom were combined features of the Western Latin-German and the Eastern Slav-Levant. Yet three years later he was to publish A királynő családja [The Queen's Family] (1932), in its first part a barely masked recounting of Simon's pageant experiences, cribbed from the pages of Szinházi élet. But as the "család" of the title indicates, in the novel Zsolt also provides the insipid beauty queen with a family with social pretensions, allowing for the broader socio-cultural exposé of life in interwar provincial Hungary and Budapest. In this study I will discuss the connection of the novel to actual historical events, highlighting in particular its descriptions of rapid urban modernization and commercialization in Budapest, aspects not commented on in the sketchy criticism devoted to it, either at the time of the work's publication, or to date.
Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Louise O. Vasvári (M.A. and Ph.D., UC, Berkeley) is Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and of Linguistics at Stony Brook University. Currently she teaches in the Linguistics Department at NYU and is also Affiliated Professor at the University of Szeged. She works in medieval studies, diachronic and sociolinguistics, Holocaust studies, and Hungarian Studies, all informed by gender theory within a broader framework of comparative cultural studies. In relation to Hungarian Cultural Studies she has published numerous articles, as well as, with Steven Tötösy, Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature (2005), Comparative Central European Holocaust Studies (2009), and Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies (2011). During the academic year 2014-2015 she was Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Central European University. She is also an elected member of the Hungarian Szépírók Társasága and since 2011 Editor-in-Chief of Hungarian Cultural Studies.