A Crowned Poetess: Carmen Sylva and the Artefacts of Royal Celebrity in Nineteenth-Century Hungarian Periodicals
A Crowned Poetess: Carmen Sylva and the Artefacts of Royal Celebrity in Nineteenth-Century Hungarian Periodicals

Author(s): Zsuzsa Török
Subject(s): Cultural history, Social history, Theory of Literature, Sociology of Literature
Published by: Addleton Academic Publishers
Keywords: Carmen Sylva; royal celebrity; Hungarian periodicals; nineteenth-century literature; Belle Époque; transnational authorship; women writers; cultural reception; literary translation; monarchy and media;
Summary/Abstract: Carmen Sylva was frequently present on the pages of Hungarian periodicals of the last two decades of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Princess Elizabeth Pauline Ottilie Louise zu Wied, who would become the first Queen of Romania in 1881, wrote extensively under the pseudonym of Carmen Sylva. According to one of her biographers, she published around fifty volumes in a variety of genres including poetry, fairy tales, dramas, short stories, novels and aphorisms. Her writings were translated to several languages and featured regularly in European periodicals, among which Hungarian magazines and newspapers, too. A real celebrity of the Belle Epoque, Carmen Sylva successfully incorporated both the traditional (based on birth privileges) and the modern (based on personal achievements) concepts of celebrity. Consequently, nineteenth-century Europe became fascinated with her exquisite figure. She came to be known as the ʻPoet-Queen’ with a highly renowned but controversial personality and oeuvre at the time. Notwithstanding the numerous biographies written about Carmen Sylva, her oeuvre became marginalized after she died in 1916. Thus, she never became a canonical figure either of German or of Romanian literature. Still, there is an increasing critical attention towards her life and work both in Germany and Romania, and more recently in Great Britain as well (Badea-Păun 2007, Zimmermann 2010, Zimmermann 2013, Nixon 2014).

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