Baroque Tradition in Early Romanticism: Grounding the Modern Literary Canon in Hungary

Bene, Sándor (2022) Baroque Tradition in Early Romanticism: Grounding the Modern Literary Canon in Hungary. Hungarian Studies, 36 (1-2). pp. 36-45. ISSN 0236-6568

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Abstract

The elaboration of a canon of literary tradition was a key issue within the renewal of Hungarian literature at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. The leading figures of the movement, Ferenc Kazinczy (1759-1831) and Ferenc Kölcsey (1790-1838), both saw Miklós Zrínyi's (1620-1664) poetry collection Adriai tengernek Syrenaia (Syrena of the Adriatic Sea), published in 1651, as a model that offered aesthetic value, national ideology, and an example for reforming the literary language. The present study examines the extent to which these aspirations may be linked to the poetic modernity of Zrínyi's time, the first half of the 17th century, and concludes that the Syrena volume was not simply a model for the successors, but it can be philologically proven that Kazinczy and his circle (mainly by following Francis Bacon) continued the agenda initiated by Zrínyi. In this sense, the waves of modernity do not follow one another, but are layered on top of one another in the history of Hungarian literature.

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