FOCUS: Papers in English Literary and Cultural Studies

In Memory of Tibor Frank (1948-2022)

Enikő Bollobás — 2024-04-30

First, a brief account of his family background: Tibor Frank came from a Jewish Hungarian family with a rich history. His ancestors included Mór Wahrmann, Hungary’s first Jewish member of Parliament after the 1867 Compromise, and the initiator of the unification of Pest, Buda and Óbuda in the Pest Parliament. At the beginning of the 2000s, on the initiative of Tibor Frank, a small street in Új- Lipótváros was named after Wahrmann (when it became clear that the street which had once borne his name, but had since become Victor Hugo Street, could not be returned to its original name). At the same time, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences established the Mór Wahrmann Award, and in 2009, a collection of Mór Wahrmann’s papers, collected meticulously by Tibor Frank, was published under the title Honszeretet és felekezeti hűség [Patriotism and Religious Loyalty], referring to the nineteenth-century politician’s fundamental position and the dual commitments that were central to his political activities. As Wahrmann wrote, “One cannot be a true patriot without being true to one’s creed, or a good citizen while neglecting religion. One’s ardent patriotism must go hand in hand with unbreakable loyalty and devotion to one’s faith.”

A Most Distinguished Hungarian Scholar of Eugene O’Neill

Mária Kurdi — 2024-04-30

Péter Egri (1932-2002) would have attained the age of ninety this year, has he not been, unfortunately, dead for twenty years. He became professor and chair of the English Department of Kossuth Lajos University, Debrecen, in the 1970s, then professor and for some years chair of the English Department in Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. The range of his scholarly interests was both wide and far-reaching. Shortly after Egri’s untimely death Zoltán Abádi Nagy wrote “A Memorial Tribute,” which says: “Péter Egri, who excelled in English, Irish and American comparative studies and aesthetics, was a man of several careers in literature alone; with musical and fine arts history and aesthetics added, a combination emerged that was unique on the Hungarian scene of the past few decades” (10). The richness of Egri’s scholarly production is available in sixteen books, some edited volumes, over two hundred studies and essays, as well as shorter writings published in Hungary and in some other countries. In view of the scope of his achievement he can rightly be called a “scholar of comparative literary and cultural studies.” As such, he was both an Anglicist and an Americanist, who addressed works by William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Aldous Huxley, J. M. Synge, G. B. Shaw, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Eugene O’Neill, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee, Tom Stoppard and others in his publications. At the beginning of his career, Egri also researched and wrote about modern Hungarian authors including Attila József and Tibor Déry.

Keable, Ian. The Century of Deception: The Birth of the Hoax in Eighteenth-Century England. London: The Westbourne Press, 2021. 305 pp. 978-1-908- 90644-1

Andrew C. Rouse — 2024-04-30

A much-awaited new volume (with a pre-publication option) by Ian Keable made its way to the physical and online stores last year. Those who have already savoured Keable’s book on the life and magic of Charles Dickens (Charles Dickens Magician: Conjuring in Life, Letters and Literature, 2014, privately published) will already know him as more than a professional magician, indeed a multiple award-winning inner member of the Magic Circle, but a wordsmith of some considerable talent and a meticulous researcher. His monthly newsletter demonstrates how he can pitch his prose according to the task in hand with literary sleight of hand. This is enjoyable as well as informative reading.

Charlton, Linda. Jane Austen and Reflective Selfhood: Rereading the Self. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. 259 pp. 978-3-031-12159-3

Rebeka Petra Simon — 2024-04-30

The scholarly discourse surrounding Jane Austen is ever growing. One of its most frequently discussed topics is related to her remarkable ability to portray the complexities of human relationships. In 2020 Tom Keymer published his book Writing, Society, Politics on Austen and addressed the scholarly criticism of her novels, including feminism, narrative techniques, and politics. In the same year, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen was published electronically to reach a wider audience. Linda Charlton’s book Jane Austen and Reflective Selfhood: Rereading the Self is a contribution to this tradition; however, her analysis examines Austen’s works through the lens of eighteenth-century philosophies of selfhood. Charlton argues that Austen’s works interact with fundamental problems of individual identity and moral judgment. She delves into the complexities of Austen’s characters and their journeys of self-discovery to show how Austen provides an insight into the nature of selfhood and personal transformation. Furthermore, Charlton relates the reading practices of characters to their capacity for self-recognition. The book’s eight chapters provide detailed close readings of Austen’s fiction, allowing readers to explore the nuances and intricacies of her characters and their journeys of self- formation.

Emma Liggins. The Haunted House in Women's Ghost Stories: Gender, Space and Modernity, 1850-1945

Viktória Osoliová — 2024-04-30

People have always been interested in the supernatural, which reveals our fascination with ghosts, spectral appearances and haunting. The popularity of the ghost story in the Victorian period has been thoroughly explored in relation to spiritualism, superstition, funerary practices, despite skepticism about the supernatural. Ghost literature became increasingly popular, especially among female authors. The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories: Gender, Space and Modernity, 1850–1945 by Emma Liggins focuses on Victorian and modernist haunted house narratives in ghost stories by female authors such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Vernon Lee, Edith Wharton, May Sinclair, and Elizabeth Bowen.

Cox, Jessica. Neo-Victorianism and Sensation Fiction. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 251 pp. ISBN: 978-3-030-2989-8

Özlem Demirel — 2024-04-30

Sensation fiction was irresistibly popular yet problematic during the nineteenth century, often because it attempted to subvert nineteenth-century values and social norms and scandalized Victorian society. Its contestable position and the intricate relationship with the historical period that created the genre itself made sensation fiction a distinctive genre in both academic and popular interest in Victorian literary studies. Its enormous influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and the apt for reading Victorians from a contemporary and postmodern perspective show the acknowledgement of the genre in critical discourse.

Fitzpatrick, Lisa, and Shonagh Hill, eds. Plays by Women in Ireland (1926-33): Feminist Theatres of Freedom and Resistance. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022. 265 pp. ISBN 978-1-350- 23463-5

Mária Kurdi — 2024-04-30

This anthology of five plays written during the Free State years in Ireland closely follows Irish Women Dramatists 1908-2001 edited by Eileen Kearney and Charlotte Headrick (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2014). Both books support the idea that, although not really visible and acknowledged until the last couple of decades, there has been a female tradition in Irish playwriting throughout the last century running parallel with the much earlier identified one of male authors. The collection under review here differs from the book by Kearney and Headrick, in which the group of seven plays spans the last century, whereas the works Fitzpatrick and Hill included, Distinguished Villa by Kate O’Brien (1926), The Woman by Margaret O’Leary (1929), Youth’s the Season ─ ? by Mary Manning (1931), Witch’s Brew by Dorothy Macardle (1931), and Bluebeard by Mary Devenport O’Neill (1933) all came to life within less than a decade. Thus they reflect on similar or intertwining problems that many individuals experienced during the period, from various angles and using idiosyncratic dramaturgies.

Anita Rákóczy, Mariko Hori Tanaka, and Nicholas E. Johnson, eds. Influencing Beckett / Beckett Influencing

Mária Kurdi — 2024-04-30

Although Beckett is a highly acclaimed author in Hungary whose works are available in translation, and his plays have been staged several times since the Hungarian premiere of Waiting for Godot in 1965, books written about him by Hungarian authors were unduly delayed. This strange, long-standing situation became luckily altered by the publication of the essay collection under review here in 2020. The essays were originally papers given at the Samuel Beckett Working Group meeting held at Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Budapest, organized by the three scholars who edited the collection. The preface to the book is written by renowned Beckett scholar Linda Ben-Zvi, also one of the organizers as representative of IFTR, the International Federation for Theatre Research, “the largest theatre organization in the world.” The Beckett Working Group of the organization had its first meeting in Tel Aviv in 1996, and in 2017 it was hosted by Károli Gáspár University of Budapest. From the start, Ben-Zvi emphasizes, discussions have been enlivened by the diverse cultural experiences of the international mix of group members, ranging from PhD students to professors (9). In accordance, the authors of the present essay collection are from several countries, including Hungary.

Ford Madox Ford’s “Cold Pastoral”: The Last Post

Angelika Reichmann — 2024-04-30

The essay discusses the last volume of Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy Parade’s End (1924-28). As Andrew Hampson and Robert Purssell highlight, whether The Last Post is an integral part of the tetralogy has been heavily debated since Graham Greene decided to publish the 1963 edition of the ‘Tietjens Saga’ as a trilogy. As they go on to explain, a major charge against the volume is “tying up too neatly various loose ends” (2013). Indeed, The Last Post seems to call for an interpretation in the pastoral tradition, which suggests that Ford’s novel—especially in comparison with Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918)—ends in an idyll even if it is not free from certain ironies inherent in pastoral literature, as Seamus O’Malley (2007) maintains. In my view, on closer scrutiny, these ironies fundamentally undermine the “too neat” ending of the tetralogy. Haunted by the aftereffects of war and the ghosts of Mark’s, Christopher’s and Valentine’s former selves, dissolving identities not only by decentering but also by doubling, this apparent idyll far too often offers glimpses of its own Gothic alter ego, a narrative of madness, imprisonment and disintegration. Yet, as consistent readings of the novel in the pastoral mode imply, the Gothic double never fully takes over but, in my interpretation, subverts the superficial idyll of The Last Post, and with that, fully optimistic interpretations of the entire tetralogy.

Back and Forth to Methuselah: Utopia, Dystopia, and Problematizing Age and Longevity in G. B. Shaw’s Interwar Play Cycle

Bence Gábor Kvéder — 2024-04-30

After the straightforward response to the horrors of the First World War in Heartbreak House (1919), Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) created a more nuanced and rather allegorical reflection on the aftermath of the military events that reshaped, among several fields of culture, both political and philosophical attitudes in Europe. In Back to Methuselah (1921), the author provides five interconnected plays from five different and, to a certain extent, imaginary eras of human history and civilization. Reaching back to biblical sources and origin myths, as well as forward to futuristic settings and certain predictions, this Shavian Pentateuch, accompanied by an equally complex Preface, is a representative of interwar utopianism. Aimed at general, age-old, and overarching, essentially eternal themes and issues, such as the meaning of life and death, possible ways to achieve maximum longevity, as well as the potential betterment and advancement of humankind, this five-part dramatic work appears to be Shaw’s first, but not only, truly “speculative” writing in the literary sense of the term. This essay presents a reading of Back to Methuselah as both a modernist piece of utopian literature and an authorial answer to wartime inhumanity, keeping the scope of analysis primarily on the features and elements that create and maintain the modern-day scientific and speculative nature of the play(s). Furthermore, I look at the way(s) in which the concept of age and the social phenomenon of ageism are addressed and utilized in the play cycle, also analyzing certain Shavian predictions regarding the future of humankind in general, as well as the dramatist’s views anticipating the emergence of a discourse later identified as posthumanism. Relying on the theoretical approaches and standpoints of recent scholarship, my ultimate
goal is to examine the forward-looking plot(s), interwar significance, and present-day relevance of G. B. Shaw’s utopian sci-fi drama cycle.

“I let down my nets and pulled.” Langston Hughes’ The Big Sea (1940) as a Slave-Narrative Inspired Autobiography

András Tarnóc — 2024-04-30

The aim of the essay is to investigate the connection between the slave narrative and the Harlem Renaissance through Langston Hughes’ The Big Sea (1940). The work recalls Hughes’ personal growth and professional development from a struggle-filled young adulthood to becoming an accomplished literary figure. I consider Hughes’s text a slave narrative-inspired autobiography. In order to substantiate my hypothesis I primarily rely on Frances Smith Foster and Kim Green’s cyclical interpretation of the slave narrative, John Olney’s theory concerning the respective form and content related conventions, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope model. I identify three formative experiences in Hughes’s life: his extended stay with his father in Mexico at age 19, his voyage to Africa in 1923 and his ”sociological study trip” to the South in 1924. My treatise retraces how the options provided by the genre of autobiography helped Langston Hughes to convert an unwritten self into literary representation.

“Tinkers” in Verse: The Dublin Gate Theatre’s Production of Donagh MacDonagh’s God’s Gentry (1951)

José Lanters — 2024-04-30

In his ballad opera God’s Gentry, produced in 1951 at the Dublin Gate Theatre under the direction of Hilton Edwards, Donagh MacDonagh set out to satirize totalitarian regimes and the welfare state by making the “class” of the tinkers the rulers of Ireland for a year, led by Marks (“Marx”) Mongan and aided by the old Irish god Balor of the Evil Eye. Written in verse and interspersed with popular folk tunes to which MacDonagh wrote new lyrics, the play imagines the tinkers’ outlook on life as the antithesis of capitalism, law and order, and Christian family values. Nora, the village shopkeeper’s daughter, is seduced by the free and merry ways of Marks and his people, but when the nation is declared bankrupt and the pagan, socialist “tinker’s republic” collapses, her jilting of Marks and her return to settled life signal a more general reversal of the nation to bourgeois values. This essay considers the way in which Travelling people are represented in the text and on the stage both as metaphorical stand-ins for politicians governing Ireland and nations beyond its borders and as an actual Irish minority perceived as an unregulated and transgressive entity—a “nation within a nation”—by the settled population. The article also considers how the life of the Travellers was imagined aesthetically in what MacDonagh referred to as the “grand” settings and costumes designed for the Gate production by Micheál Mac Liammóir, who also played the part of Marks.

Heroes on Stage: Robert Emmet, Charles Parnell, and Michael Collins in Three Irish Plays from Interwar Avant-garde to the 1990s

Wei H. Kao — 2024-04-30

Once they enter the zone of public memory, historical figures, however celebrated they might be, are no longer able to speak for themselves, but become objectified by historians, creative writers, and interested parties down through the generations. Their portraits of revolutionaries might potentially counteract the subjugation imposed by colonial and anti-colonial powers and give them a more humane touch that prompts the audiences’ independent judgments. Representations of these historical figures might therefore put their contributions, personalities and even charisma under the microscope, challenging the historiography that tends to apotheosize them as heroes. The plays under discussion, chosen for their particularly avant-garde innovations and not yet fully discussed in the literature, are Dennis Johnston’s The Old Lady Says “No!” (1929), Larry Kirwan’s Mister Parnell (1992), and Tom MacIntyre’s Good Evening, Mr Collins (1995). These plays feature Robert Emmet, Charles Parnell, and Michael Collins, renowned yet still controversial Irish revolutionaries, respectively.