A transcultural reading of Banská Štiavnica/Selmecbánya novels

Tóth, Anikó N. (2024) A transcultural reading of Banská Štiavnica/Selmecbánya novels. HUNGARIAN STUDIES: A JOURNAL OF THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR HUNGARIAN STUDIES AND BALASSI INSTITUTE, 38 (1). pp. 73-86. ISSN 0236-6568

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Abstract

For centuries, Banská Štiavnica (Schemnitz, Selmecbánya) – like the mining towns of Lower Hungary – was a multicultural (predominantly German, Slovak and Hungarian) settlement, economic and commercial centre. The different cultures did not live in isolation, but crossed each other, creating ever-changing relationships, which can be explained by the constant exchange of inhabitants. The paper will examine how Slovak and Hungarian literary texts closely linked to the city reflect the mixing and interaction of cultures. Using transcultural perspectives and the conceptual framework of transcultural literary studies, it analyses not only contemporary but also 20th-century novels that pay particular attention to issues of identity, multilingualism and cultural permeation. Part of the paper is focused on the local and cultural identity of the selected authors, because Banská Štiavnica as a specific place of the meeting of cultures is a defining chronotope, the birthplace or temporary home of many important novelists, poets and literary scholars, and the experiences associated with the town can often be found in their works. The lecture further focuses on anthroponyms in the novels under study, as it suggests that the hybridity of identity is also reflected in the protagonists' choice of names. By analyzing the novel's spaces, it characterizes forms of translocality. Travel is a defining and recurrent motif in the selected novels, so the lecture also addresses the issue of mobility: how displacement in space enables personality to keep moving, how identity is formed by the juxtaposition of the self and the stranger at the intersection of different cultures.

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