Mór Jókai in a Different Light
Jókai Mórról másképpen
Keywords: Hungarian literary history; Mór Jókai (1825-1904);19th century literary analysis;
Having received a fresh impetus in the past decade, research on Jókai has opened a new chapter in the history of the novel of Hungarian Romanticism, especially in that of Jókai interpretations. Jókai perceived as the storyteller of the Hungarian big prose has been replaced by an author of modern thinking who would regularly try his hand at new possibilities offered by prose epic; an author who was simultaneously the popular writer of national literature and a writer reacting to European novelist attempts in his own way; an author whose place in world literature is only now beginning to take shape. This collection of studies explores the somewhat neglected areas of the Jókai scholarship. The analyses strive to show how a couple of Jókai works establish the kind of prose that speaks the same language as other European literatures, and at the same time, how they break the ground for a more complex and more “modern” novel that converses with our present. This volume, while touching upon some Jókai works that have been not been discussed so far, sketches the portrait of a writer who, in the cover of his novels, loves to experiment and is open to what the world has to offer.
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