Hungarian Literature on Stage and Screen: Translation, Adaptation, Recalibration

Adaptations of Hungarian literature have generally been motivated by a desire to popularize Hungarian culture and to broaden the spectrum of reception. The circulation of cultural outputs and the interventions carried out in the process contribute to the integration of Hungarian literature into global literary systems. Among the most highprofile adaptations of Hungarian literary texts, film versions of novels are dominant and these cover the entire gamut of the canon, from intellectually sophisticated to middle-brow works and examples of genre fiction. A prerequisite for most film adaptations is the existence of a certain cult status, and a key theme underpinning many original works is a preoccupation with the post-war period and its aftermath. Thus, there is a recurrence of the communist era, from the 1950s to the 1980s, and Hungary at the confluence of Eastern and Central Europe. That said, patterns in the reception of adaptations have been varied despite the success of the respective literary works, and this is mainly due to differences in approaching the relationship between source and target works, and in positioning the resulting adaptation. Transnational adaptations alongside adaptive explorations created within the source cultural context have had wider appeal and significantly enhanced the visibility of Hungarian literature abroad.

Synthesizes contemporary research on world literature while introducing Hungarian literature's 'worldliness' to an international readership.

Hungarian Literature as World Literature provides readers less familiar with the Hungarian national context with new access to local variations on an already familiar comparative or historical problem. Rather than reducing the project of situating Hungarian literature as world literature to a search for causal, mechanical and hierarchical types of influence exerted by world literature on Hungarian literature, or investigating the latter's sporadic occurrences on the 'great stage' of literature in the major languages, the volume offers a more complex and nuanced way to reveal the multimodal relationships they form.

Authors in this volume consider the Hungarian national literature as an open geo-poetical and geopolitical space, which is at once wider and smaller than the monolingual, nation-state oriented, territorially closed frame of observation that characterizes most national literary historiography. In this intersectional space, the geopolitical reading discloses local transformations of broader poetical or ideological movements and their feedback into the world system, the geopolitical contexts behind poetic forms and narrative constructions. Hungarian Literature as World Literature draws a vital link between the collecting and curating practices that preserve and disseminate Hungarian literature and a theoretical conversation that is being held in English, on an international level, about the future of the concept of 'world literature'.