Abstracts

Plenaries: Clíona Ó Gallchoir • Ferenc Hörcher

Panelists: Éva Antal • Dóra Janczer Csikós • Krisztina Kaló • Bálint Gárdos • Veronika Ruttkay • Katalin Pálinkás

Speakers: Andl-Beck Boróka • Barta Alexandra • Demirel, Özlem • Gyenis Dorina • Hartvig Gabriella • Hochmanová, Dita • Irving, Roslyn Joy • Krajnik, Filip • Kurdi Mária • Kvéder Bence • Lukács Laura • Maczelka Csaba • Matek, Ljubica • Simon Rebeka • Simon Réka • Tóth Orsolya

Plenaries

Clíona Ó Gallchoir

University College Cork

A matrilineal literary inheritance? Frances Sheridan and Anne Elizabeth Sheridan Le Fanu

Frances Sheridan has long been acknowledged as one of the most significant early Irish women writers, the author not only of the acclaimed sentimental novel, The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, but also a successful playwright. The publication in 2017 of The Triumph of Prudence over Passion in a new edition by Aileen Douglas and Ian Campbell Ross, in which they identify Sheridan’s daughter Elizabeth (‘Betsy’) as its author, offers us an unusual opportunity to explore two generations of women’s literary creativity in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Ireland and Britain. Elizabeth Sheridan was only 8 years old when her mother died, but as Douglas and Ross have suggested, her “matrilineal inheritance” consisted both of an acute sense of the loss and absence of the mother, and a response to and continued exploration of the characteristic themes of her mother’s texts. This paper will build on the work of Douglas and Ross to discuss the work of both Frances and Elizabeth Sheridan as contributions to the literary construction of motherhood and daughterhood in the eighteenth-century novel.

Clíona Ó Gallchoir is a lecturer in the School of English and Digital Humanities at University College Cork. She is the editor, with Heather Ingman, ofA History of Modern Irish Women’s Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and has published widely on Irish writing and women’s writing in the eighteenth and nineteen centuries, most recently an essay on Elizabeth Griffith in The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights, 1716-2016 (Liverpool University Press, 2021) and on the early Irish novel in Irish Literature in Transition, 1700-1780 (Cambridge University Press, 2020). She is an expert on Maria Edgeworth, who was the subject of her monograph Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenment and Nation (UCD Press, 2005). She also edited several volumes in the Pickering and Chatto Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth, and contributed an article on Edgeworth and Robinson Crusoe to the 2020 special issue of European Romantic Review edited by Susan Manly and Joanna Wharton. [back to top]

Ferenc Hörcher

University of Public Service
Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Philosophy

The word and the image: early modern female self-representations in the works of Cavendish and Gentileschi

This lecture offers a parallel of my earlier work on the self-representation of Montaigne and Rembrandt. We know it from Greenblatt, that self-fashioning was crucial in the age. In the works of courtiers from Castiglione to Gracián we find ample proofs of this claim. Men of letters and men of ideas were eager to make sense of their own life and struggles, while the genre of the self-portrait was quite fashinable on the art-market as well, from Dürer to Rembrandt and further. This talk compares two early modern artists and women of ideas: the painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1654/6) and the writer and thinker Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673). Cavendish’s autobiography was entitled A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life (1656). Gentileschi, who was at least a generation older than Cavendish, painted a number of self-portraits. Although the different branches of art provided different opportunities of (re)creating the self, our two heroines showed that courageous women were ready to fight their fights in order to be able to represent themselves in an honest and sometimes even cruel and realistic manner. That they were able to look into their own eyes even after the most tragic moment of their lives, that was partly due to the fact, that they still trusted the Biblical teaching of imago Dei. Inhabiting, however, an instable world between the Renaissance, Mannerism and the Baroque, and offering an insight into their own often confused Lebenswelt, the comparative study of our artists’ works promises to help us to a better understanding not only of the nature of early modern art and thought, but also of our own late-modern conditio humana and – if something like that still exists – of our own calling.

Ferenc Hörcher (1964) is a political philosopher, historian of political thought and philosopher of art. He studied in Budapest (Hungary), Oxford (UK) and Brussels/Leuven (Belgium). He is director of the Research Institute of Politics and Government and senior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Science. He was visitng professor at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków (Poland) and the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca (Kolozsvár, Romania). He researched in Vienna (Austria), Göttingen (Germany), Wassenaar (Holland), Cambridge (UK), Edinburgh (UK) and at Notre Dame University (USA). His reseach interests include: conservatism and liberalism, the history of early modern political thought, classical Hungarian political thought, early modern and contemporary philosophy of art. He is the author of The Political Philosophy of the European City (Lexington Books, 2021) and A Political Philosophy of Conservatism. Prudence, Moderation and Tradition (Bloomsbury, New York – London, 2020). His most recent monograph is Art and Politics in Roger Scruton’s Conservative Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)

Panel

Nonconformist Marys and Marias: Women on Self-Development in English Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century (panel)

Convenors:

Éva Antal <antal.eva@uni-eszterhazy.hu>

Dóra Janczer Csikós <csikos.dora@btk.elte.hu>

The panel is inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft’s, Mary Robinson’s, Mary Hays’s, and Mary Shelley’s work and by their revolutionary novels, Mary (1788), Maria (1798), The Victim of Prejudice (1799), and Mathilda (1820) among others. In all these works, the female protagonist struggles to find her own way in life, aiming to fulfil her self-development and to escape the constraints of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The panel intends to give voice to those courageous women—writers, journalists and fictional characters—who dared to question, criticise and/or transgress the boundaries of their social roles, emphasising the importance of (self-)education, self-knowledge and self-reliance. We welcome proposals discussing prose, fictional and poetic works written by “the nonconformist Marys and Marias” and the papers will also focus on other genres, such as treatises, journalistic pieces, or fables, in addition to novels, and life writing while keeping the main concern of contextualised female self-development in mind.

Éva Antal, Eszterházy Károly Catholic University, Eger, Hungary <antal.eva@uni-eszterhazy.hu>

Eighteenth-Century Sisterhood in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Reading and Reviews

In her pedagogical and philosophical minded works on women’s development, Mary Wollstonecraft ardently propagated critical reading of sensible works. In the edited volume, The Female Reader (1789), in addition to the careful selection of the English classics (from Shakespeare, Milton, the essays of The Spectator, The Rambler etc.), she also offers several writings of female authors for consideration to young girls. In the preface, she claims that women’s education is a life-long, solitary process, “as we are created accountable creatures we must run the race ourselves, and by our exertions acquire virtue: the outmost our friends can do is to point out the right road, and clear away some of the loose rubbish which might at first retard our progress” (The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, eds. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, vol. 4, London: William Pickering, 1989, 53–353, 60, italics are mine). On the one hand, Mary Wollstonecraft disapproved light-hearted sentimental fiction; on the other hand, having read and known the radical works written by her contemporaries—Mary Robinson, Mary Hays, Ann Radcliffe, Fanny Burney, Catharine Macaulay, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, and Mme de Staël, she published numerous reviews under the pseudonym ’O’ in Joseph Johnson’s the Analytical Review (1788–97), supporting the reading of thought-provoking writings. In my paper, I will map the basic principles her reviews present, such as taste, order, knowledge, and authenticity, while I also study her views on contemporary women writers. Consequently, in my argumentation, I will highlight the forms of eighteenth-century intellectual sisterhood.

Keywords: Mary Wollstonecraft, education, reading, Analytical Review, sisterhood

Éva Antal is a professor of English Literature and Philosophy at Eszterházy Károly Catholic University, Eger, Hungary. In 2001 she defended her doctoral dissertation since then she has been teaching 18^th and 19^th c. British literature, contemporary literary theory, and aesthetics. In 2010 she was a Visiting Grant Scholar at NIAS (The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences) and in 2011 she successfully obtained a tenured professorship in philosophy. Currently, she is working on an educationalist project, focusing on women’s philosophy of education in 18^th and 19^th centuries. In autumn 2019, she was a visiting researcher at the University of Glasgow and in January 2020, she was a guest professor at the research centre IDEA, University de Lorraine (Nancy–Metz, France). [back to top]

Dóra Janczer Csikós, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest <csikos.dora@btk.elte.hu>

“It is not necessary that I should marry”: Self-reliance in Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice (1799)

By the end of the eighteenth century, motherhood had come to be seen as the ultimate source of female identity. The maternal body was invested with different meanings; it was simultaneously glorified and demonised, depending on whether it was submitted to patriarchal control or not. The cult of motherhood constructed women as naturally submissive and nurturing; any unconventional expressions of maternity were branded as monstrous. The re-assessment of the sanctity of motherhood is one of the key features of Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice. The novel, a radical response to Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman, challenges prevailing ideas of domesticity as represented in the idealised mother figure. Through the lives of three female characters, Hays interrogates different attitudes to maternity and different modes of education. She creates a heroine who defiantly refuses to become a wife and ends up mothering a disruptive text exposing the fallacy of gendered education.

Dóra Janczer Csikós is a senior lecturer at the English Department of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Her research addresses the intersections of art and literature, and issues of gender in the visual and material culture of the 18^th century. In particular, she examines attitudes to rape in literature, music and painting, William Blake’s composite art, and the reception of the opera seria in Britain. Her book on William Blake’s The Four Zoas re-interprets Blake’s prophecy in the light of Lipot Szondi’s psychoanalytical theory. She is currently working on a study on the myth of Lucretia in literature, painting and music. Her most recent publication is “Reflections and Thoughts on Female Education: from the Lady’s Magazine to Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice” in Female Voices: Forms of Women’s Reading, Self-Education and Writing in Britain (1770–1830), Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2022. [back to top]

Krisztina Kaló, Eszterházy Károly Catholic University, Eger, Hungary <kalo.krisztina@uni-eszterhazy.hu>

Eighteenth-Century Female Conditions as Reflected in Maria Edgeworth’s Fictive Letters

The life and work of Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849) are prime examples of women writers’ conditions in England and Ireland in the long eighteenth century; nonetheless, Edgeworth’s writings are only occasionally studied in Hungary. Being an educated woman in a society where this was mostly seen unfavourably, Miss Edgeworth held critical views on politics, economy, and education and fought for a better recognition of women as writers, critical thinkers, and full-right citizens to approach questions of first-rate importance from their perspectives: education, marriage, estate management, and morality, for instance. Although her name is mainly associated with her debut novel (Castle Rackrent, 1800), the paper will focus on her less discussed work written prior to that. In fact, her first ever published work, Letters for Literary Ladies (1795), takes up the question of female education, which will become an important pillar of her future writing career. In the two sets of letters—the first between her father and his friend, the second between two young ladies—completed by an essay of advice for the attention of young ladies, refute the arguments against women’s intellectual training in a witty way in a dramatized debate. Reflecting prevalent viewpoints and arguments of the period, the exchanges of letters shed light on eighteenth-century social history, more specifically on the history of women’s rights to education.

Keywords: Maria Edgeworth, women’s rights, female perspective, education, epistolary form

Krisztina Kaló (PhD), associate professor, Department of British and American Studies, Faculty of Arts and Letters, Eszterházy Károly Catholic University, Eger, Hungary, conducts seminars on British literature from the beginnings to the 19^th century, teaches specialised translation at BA and MA levels, and does research in classical and modern epistolary novels, mainly but not exclusively in European and North-American literature. Her field of interest expands beyond the traditional letter and covers the most recent epistolary forms, such as email or text messages in literary works. She translates literary and non-literary texts from and into Hungarian, English, and French. As a co-translator, she was involved in the publication of Kelemen Mikes’s eighteenth-century epistolary fiction in France, Lettres de Turquie [Letters from Turkey] (Honoré Champion, 2011). Another epistolary novel, Les Lettres d’Esther [The Little French Bookshop] by Cécile Pivot, was published in Hungarian in her translation in 2023. [back to top]

Bálint Gárdos, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest <balintgardos@gmail.com>

Madame Brulart’s Bastille-bijoux: Echoes of history in private lives in women’s writings around the French Revolution

In her Letters Written in France (1790) poet, novelist, translator and Britain’s unofficial foreign correspondent Helen Maria Williams records the case of a certain Madame Brulart, “who wears at her breast a medallion made of a stone of the Bastille polished. In the middle of the medallion, Liberté was written in diamonds; above was marked, in diamonds, the planet that shone on the 14th of July; and below was seen the moon, of the size she appeared that memorable night.” Alternating between grand scenes of public events and emotionally charged narratives of individual lives, one could see such a tiny observation as emblematic of broader patterns in the Letters and probably even beyond that. In his foundational 2000 monograph Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740-1820 Mark Salber Phillips convincingly described such cases as instances of “sentimental”, often novelistic history entering private, individual lives. This paper proposes to look at a few similar instances with an aim of complementing Phillips’s study by showing how the classical, rhetorical model of “exemplary history” survives, even if much altered, in these modern narratives. Although no longer only an educated response of a statesman to the acts of an earlier statesman, the more open-ended modern variety still often wishes to understand individual lives as echoes of larger, public historical events.

Bálint Gárdos is senior lecturer at ELTE University, the Department of English. His research concerns the tradition of exemplary history and eighteenth century British literature. [back to top]

Veronika Ruttkay, Károli Gáspár University, Budapest <ruttkayveron@googlemail.com>

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the idea of modern tragedy

Writing about Mary Shelley’s novel in an anonymous review, Percy Bysshe Shelley described it as a “strange drama” with “irresistible and deep” pathos that advances towards its “startling catastrophe” with accelerated speed. This kind of language comes from drama criticism and specifically, from how tragedy had been discussed in the long tradition originating from Aristotle’s Poetics. In this paper I argue that, even apart from any practical considerations, the review responded to a layer of meaning in Frankenstein that has been rarely discussed: that Shelley’s novel is, among other things, a momentous reckoning with the genre of tragedy. Tragedy was, at the time, eagerly studied by critics; nearly all romantic poets tried to write one, but none really succeeded. I propose that Shelley herself entered this debate and, of all her contemporaries, gave the most non-conformist answer. From this angle, the subtitle may be read as an oblique reference to what is probably the first extant tragedy in human history, Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. By calling her work, specifically, the Modern Prometheus, Shelley alerted readers to the ways in which time-honoured structures of tragedy are reconfigured and subverted in her novel, demonstrating what modern tragedy may look like, and articulating a tragic strain in modernity that still speaks to us today.

Veronika Ruttkay is assistant professor at Károli Gáspár University, Budapest. She has published articles and book chapters on British literature in the 18^th and 19^th centuries (including Mary Shelley, S. T. Coleridge and Robert Burns) and on the Hungarian reception of British literature (e. g. Shakespeare, Ossian and Burns). [back to top]

Katalin Pálinkás, Independent Researcher, Budapest <kati.palinkas@gmail.com>

Excess and Vulnerability in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man creates a dystopian vision of the future that is strongly tied to the past, personal loss and grief, as it commemorates, in a fictionalized roman à clef, the circle of friends Shelley survived, “the last relic of a beloved race.” The Last Man persistently defies generic expectations: as regards plot and character, it is loosely structured, episodic, panoramic, and often reads as a quick succession of mental states of larger-than-life characters. These characters all exhibit excessive or transgressive traits, such as excessive ambition, idealism, anxiety or sympathy, which suggest lack of control, unstable personalities, or dispersal of self. The pervasiveness of excess loosens certain attitudes and mentalities from subjectivity. On the other hand, the plot is characterized by excessive mobility and the plague that brings humanity to the verge of extinction is an uncontrollable agent of death, a form of demonic excess. In my paper I will examine how the various ways excess figures in The Last Man question our desire and capacity for control and containment and reveal a radical vulnerability. Even though the postapocalyptic vision leads to dissolution and death, the characters and events keep haunting the reader as if Shelley succeeded in fictionally restoring life – life that exceeds literary representation – to that “beloved race” in her romance.

Katalin Pálinkás is an independent researcher, holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Indiana University, Bloomington. She has taught courses at Indiana University, at the School of English and American Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, and at the Department of Literary and Cultural Studies in English, Károli Gáspár University. Her main research areas are British Romanticism, women poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and lyric theory, with an emphasis on temporality, affect theory and phenomenology. Her publications include “The City as a Lyric Archive of Affects in Lisa Robertson’s Occasional Work and Seven Walks” (Geographies of Affect, 2021), “A női szerzők és az irodalmi nyilvánosság”, “A szonett újrafelfedezése” (Az angol irodalom magyar története, 2021), “Moments of Suspension in Lyric Poetry: Hanging Listening in Wordsworth’s ‘There was a Boy’” (Rare Device: Writings in Honour of Ágnes Péter, 2011), “Táj, tényekkel. Vers és jegyzet párbeszéde Charlotte Smith Beachy Head című költeményében” (Forradalom és retorika, 2008). [back to top]

Session Papers

Andl-Beck Boróka, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest

“Must our wants find their supply in murder?”: Intersectional social conscience in Ann Yearsley’s A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade

For Ann Yearsley, issues like the abolition of the slave trade and the improvement of the working and living conditions of the English labouring classes were significant not only in her everyday life but also in her literary output. In the late eighteenth century, female writers had little chance to enter the public and literary discourse, but their voices were becoming gradually more audible, and the public literary and political platforms more accessible. Authors like Hannah More and Anna Laetitia Barbauld were at the forefront of the fight against slavery, but their backgrounds did not necessarily preordain their abolitionist positions – it was Yearsley whose social strata was the closest to the people whose liberation she advocated for. Rejecting the notion that the distance between Great Britain and its colonies where the slaves suffer most could be ignored by English authors and politicians due to geographical distance, Yearsley made a point that centuries later began to interest the likes of Judith Butler, who considered whether humans could ethically relate to human suffering at a distance. I would argue that Yearsley’s solidarity extended beyond the border of Britain and the continent of Europe precisely because she had experienced that proximity guarantees neither help nor compassion. Her general interest in politics, her radical, Protestant stance against exploitative practices, and her position as a woman intersect and inform the rhetorical and poetical gestures present in her work A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade (1788).

Boróka Andl-Beck graduated from the University of Vienna in 2021 and is currently a student of English literature at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Her scholarly work is mostly concerned with the ‘imagined Gypsy’ and the Western, Oriental gaze in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary fiction, ethnographical works, and newspaper articles, with the representation of marginalised groups in Britain and the arbitrary categorisation of humans as a broader field of interest. Recently, she has won first place at the 2023 OTDK competition and participated in conferences like DIASPORA 2023: Communities Beyound Borders, and the annual Eötvös Conference. [back to top]

Alexandra Barta, Independent Researcher, Budapest

Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World and the Challenges of Translating Early Modern Texts

Margaret Cavendish was a versatile figure of 17th-century literary and scientific life; She was a poet, a playwright, philosopher and a scientist, and, as the sole woman who published her works under her name, she frequently commented upon the underprivileged status of women in the scientific community. Although Cavendish wanted to establish herself as a scientist, she faced difficulties when she attempted to join the scientific community. Her exclusion from the Royal Society not only demonstrates how the scientific revolution drove women from any direct involvement in scientific activity, but such a negative experience had a huge influence on her when she wrote the first utopian-romance-science-fiction of the world. In The Blazing World, Cavendish comments upon the historical context of her age and articulates a harsh critique of the male-dominated scientific community, thereby, from a translator’s perspective, it is essential to review the scientific background of the age, and thus preserving the initial endeavour of the piece. In my research, I likewise suggest that the hybrid philosophers of The Blazing World symbolise the rigidness and misconceptions of 17th-century scientific men. To establish the necessary background for my arguments, I will first review the structure of the work, the main ideas presented, and those aspects of the Royal Society that are subjects of Cavendish’s criticism. Then, I will focus on the ideas presented in a selected excerpt of The Blazing World, their prominence in light of the historical background and the possible translational challenges.

Alexandra Barta is an independent researcher from Budapest. She obtained a master’s degree in English literature at Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary in 2022. Her thesis focused on the possible explanations of the stage directional differences between the two texts of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in light of The Henslowe Diary. She is likewise interested in Margaret Cavendish’s works. She is currently translating and researching Cavendish’s The Blazing World. [back to top]

Özlem Demirel, University of Pécs

From Udolpho to Manderley: Navigating Feminine Identity through the Gothic tradition

Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) not only stands as a cornerstone of Gothic literature but also as an exploration of gender dynamics within the genre. Radcliffe’s 18th-century novel serves as a seminal text that has set the stage for the exploration of women’s roles, identities, and struggles within patriarchal contexts through the Gothic genre. This enduring influence finds thematic resonance in Daphne du Maurier’s later work, Rebecca (1938), attesting to Radcliffe’s legacy in addressing the complexities of womanhood against a Gothic backdrop. In both novels, the Gothic functions as a mechanism for critiquing and examining the limitations, challenges, and possibilities for women in patriarchal societies. For instance, the isolated, menacing settings (gothic castles) in both novels symbolise the social isolation and vulnerability that their female characters experience. This study endeavours to understand how both novels employ Gothic settings and elements to act as catalysts that bring issues such as female psychological resilience, evolving social roles, and confrontations with patriarchal authority to the forefront. By conducting a close reading of the novels, this paper argues that the Gothic elements in The Mysteries of Udolpho and Rebecca serve not merely as atmospheric tools but as critical frameworks that empower the novels’ female protagonists to challenge and navigate the patriarchal norms of their societies. In doing so, the study aims to provide a comprehensive analysis that explores how both novels use Gothic elements as tools for feminist critique in different periods.

Keywords: The Mysteries of Udolpho, Rebecca, Gothic, female identity

Bio: Özlem Demirel completed her BA in English Language Teaching from Maltepe University in 2019 and acquired her MA in English Studies, majoring in Literature, from the University of Pécs in 2021. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Pécs, in Pécs/Hungary. Her area of interest includes the theme of double, or Doppelganger, its manifestations in literature, Victorian and neo-Victorian literature, feminist literary theories, adaptation studies, as well as sensation fiction, and its afterlives in the contemporary period. [back to top]

Gyenis Dorina, University of Pécs

An Exiled Hero and the Throne of a New World – Margaret Cavendish and the ‘Romancical’

While English prose romances seemingly fell out of favor of high cultural appreciation by the early 17^th century, potentially due to the appearance of parodies and satires, Restoration works such as The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish speak of the enduring popularity of the genre and its prevalence among prose fiction genres in the late seventeenth century. Cavendish was a prolific writer who produced a variety of texts ranging from works on natural philosophy to closet dramas, yet still allowed a place for romances within her oeuvre. In fact, in The Blazing World, she calls the readers’ attention to it, referring to the entire first part as ‘Romancical’, and deeming it worthy to be placed alongside the ‘Philosophical’ and the ‘Fantastical’ parts. Furthermore, Cavendish offers a not too frequent context and dimension to the English prose romance of the time: the perspective of a female author. The paper provides an analysis of the elements of romance, old and new, as well as their significance in Margaret Cavendish’s prose works, and places the work and its self-reflexive aspects in the context of contemporary debates about romance and other prose fiction genres.

Dorina Katalin Gyenis is a postgraduate student of English Literature at the University of Pécs. Her previous research focused on English prose romance in print from the late Middle Ages through the Early Modern period, with special attention to how the contemporary sociocultural and historical context affected and shaped the publication processes. [back to top]

Hartvig Gabriella, University of Pécs

Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph and the Contemporary Novel

In his work, The Triumvirate,Richard Griffith parodies two distinct features of the epistolary novels Clarissa and Sidney Bidulph: prolonged suffering arising from a misguided sense of filial duty, and extended life writing. This challenges the conventional concept of poetical justice, which would typically dictate that Clarissa be rewarded in this life, and Sidney live happily in the remaining part of her life. The protracted publication of subsequent parts in both cases mirrors the insatiable desire of the writer–to write for as long as one lives, and, additionally, to live as long as one writes, as Sterne famously remarked. This desire seems to persist beyond life itself, as evidenced by the posthumous publication of works by both Sheridan and Sterne. In my paper, I aim to examine how Sheridan’s novel, both in its title and narrative form, becomes attached to and stands out among the novels published in the 1760s.

Gabriella Hartvig is an associate professor of English literature at the University of Pécs. She published Laurence Sterne Magyarországon, 1790-1860 (“Laurence Sterne in Hungary, 1790-1860,” 2000) and The Critical and Creative Reception of Eighteenth-Century British and Anglo-Irish Authors in Hungary: Essays in Intercultural Literary Exchange (2013). Her articles have appeared in various journals including The Shandean, The AnaChronist, Translation and Literature, and HJEAS. She has also contributed chapters on the reception of Sterne, Ossian, and Swift to the series The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe. Her main area of research is the eighteenth-century British and Anglo-Irish novel and its Hungarian reception. [back to top]

Dita Hochmanová, Masaryk University, Brno

Marriage and Masculinity in the Later Fiction of Eliza Haywood

Even though texts created by women were occasionally recognized by the public, it was not until Aphra Behn’s career that women in England were known to make a living by the pen. Following the example of her successful predecessor, Eliza Haywood managed to establish herself as a skilled professional on the otherwise male-dominated literary scene and was even among the top bestselling writers of her era. Although she was marginalized and ridiculed by her contemporaries for embracing the low genre of amatory fiction, recent research stresses her contribution in shaping the genre of the novel, which is often associated with her male rivals. As prose fiction gained importance and formed a powerful medium of influence, it became an important source of social and political commentary. Since Haywood’s prolific writings were widely read by people across social classes, her views came to the attention of a broad readership, and therefore helped to form new ideas of gender roles. This paper explores Haywood’s portrayals of masculinity in the context of the ongoing debate about desirable masculine models and compares her work with that of her more well-known contemporaries, Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson. By briefly examining the narrative strategies in her rebellious early novels, Love in Excess (1719) and Idalia (1723), and then focusing on her later novels of marriage, The Fortunate Foundlings (1744) and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), the paper maps how Haywood adapted to the changing sensibilities of her audiences and offers a more balanced insight into the discussion on masculinity around the middle of the century.

Dita Hochmanová is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Education, Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. During her studies, she focused on the role of Henry Fielding’s work in the forming of new gender models and politeness standards of his time. Her current research interests include the development of the novel as a genre, satirical prose in eighteenth-century England, and masculinity studies. [back to top]

Roslyn Joy Irving, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz

“Her jealousy of Adeline, However She Could Not Communicate”: Ann Radcliffe Writing Intergenerational Relationships

Ann Radcliffe is integral both to the literary canon of eighteenth-century English writers and to the popularisation of women as novelists (Miles 18, Townshend and Wright 6). This paper addresses the intergenerational relationships between women in Radcliffe’s novels. Sampling the ageing adoptive mother figures, Madame de Menon in A Sicilian Romance, Madame La Motte and Madame La Luc in The Romance of the Forest, Madame Cheron in The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Signora Bianchi in The Italian, I will discuss the ways Radcliffe writes and reconfigures the orphan heroines’ relationships with ageing women (Hoeveler 58). As the quotation given in the title implies, these relationships are often fraught negotiations, marked by failures or inabilities to communicate between generations, conflicts of interests and differing priorities. The relationship between women, and arguably the role of the ageing woman as more than a construction of sensibility, is a rich area of Radcliffe’s writing only recently gaining critical attention (Zlosnik and Horner 186).

Roslyn is in the final stages of her PhD with the University of Liverpool and XJTLU. Her research focuses on Ann Radcliffe’s romances, particularly The Romance of the Forest, in relation to historiography, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century conceptions of time. Roslyn also lectures at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Roslyn’s other research interests outside of her studies include the Littoral Gothic and postcolonial approaches to literature and the archive. Her recent publications include a contribution to the Routledge Introduction to Poetic Forms and an article for the Polish Journal of English Studies on Ageing in The Romance of the Forest. [back to top]

Filip Krajnik, Masaryk University, Brno

On Nuns, Husbands and Purgatories: Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun and 18^th-Century Actors’ Adaptation for the Theatre

Robert Southerne’s tragicomedy The Fatal Marriage, or, The Innocent Adultery (1694) is a unique mix of two distinct stories, a comic and a tragic one, which both ultimately go back to Boccaccio’s Decameron. While the comic plot had been known to English audiences in several Renaissance iterations – including Edward Sharpham’ The Fleire (c. 1607), the first part of Thomas D’Urfey’s The Comical History of Don Quixote (1694), and John Fletcher’s The Night Walker, or, The Little Thief (c. 1611, rev. by James Shirley by 1633) – the tragic plot clearly borrows from Aphra Behn’s then recently published novella The History of the Nun, or, The Fair Vow-Breaker (printed 1689). Multiple adaptations of both the stories and their complex relationships in the 18^th century show us that the adaptation process for the theatre goes well beyond the textual material of the sources, as well as beyond the straightforward “source – adaptation” connection. What is even more interesting is that two most influential 18^th-century adaptations of Southerne’s plots, The Humours of Purgatory (1716) and Isabella, or, The Fatal Marriage (1757), were both written by actors who previously played in Southerne’s piece. The adapters (Benjamin Griffin and David Garrick, respectively), therefore, not only streamlined their chosen strand of their source, but also imbued their works with the element of “ghosting”, as described by Employing Marvin Carlson. The present paper will use Aphra Behn’s novella (and, to a lesser extent, Southerne’s comic plot from Decameron) and its afterlife to explore the issue of late early-modern dramatic adaptation from a theatrical rather than purely literary perspective.

Filip Krajník teaches early English literature at the Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. Together with a broad team of researchers, he is currently finishing a project on English Restoration theatre as a trans-national and multi-genre phenomenon. Together with Anna Hrdinová, he is also completing an edited volume on late 17^th– and early-18^th-century English theatre, entitled Restoration Reshaping: Shifting Forms, Genres and Conventions in English Theatre, 1660–1737 (to be published in 2024). His translations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II into Czech premiered in 2022 and 2023, respectively. [back to top]

Kurdi Mária, University of Pécs

From Frances Sheridan’s A Trip to Bath (1765) to Elizabeth Kuti’s The Whisperers (1999)

After producing some works of fiction, Frances Sheridan turned to the genre of drama and had two of her plays premiered in Drury Lane Theatre by David Garrick’s Company, which were The Discovery (1763) and The Dupe (1764). Inspired by the good reception of these, Sheridan embarked on a third piece, A Trip to Bath (1765), which then remained unfinished because of the early death of the author. Over two centuries later, in the 1990s the Hungarian-English playwright, Elizabeth Kuti, who was doing her PhD at Trinity College while acting and writing plays for the Irish stage, discovered Sheridan’s unfinished play and published an essay about it. Furthermore, Kuti wrote a final act to make Sheridan’s text complete and gave a new title, The Whisperers, to her adaptation. In 1999, the thus reborn drama went into production by Rough Magic Theatre Company and had a successful run in Dublin. Placing the original and its millennial version in a comparative framework, this paper will discuss issues related to authorship, re-writing and intercultural connections in the realm of theatre.

Mária Kurdi is professor emerita in the Institute of English Studies at the University of Pécs, Hungary. Her main research areas are modern Irish literature, English-speaking drama and comparative
studies. So far she has published six books in these areas and edited or co-edited several essay collections. Her own books include Representations of Gender and Female Subjectivity in Contemporary Irish Drama by Women (Edwin Mellen Press, 2010) and Approaches to Irish Theatre through a Hungarian’s Lens: Essays and Review Articles (Pécs: University Pécs, Institute of English Studies, 2018). Her edited volumes include Literary and Cultural Relations: Ireland, Hungary, and Central and Eastern Europe and Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices by Women in Ireland (co-edited with Miriam Haughton), which were published by Carysfort Press of Dublin in 2009 and 2015 respectively). In addition, Mária Kurdi publishes scholarly articles in both English and Hungarian journals and essay collections on a regular basis. She is editor-in-chief of the biennial journal FOCUS: Papers in English Literary and Cultural Studies. [back to top]

Kvéder Bence, University of Pécs

The Sister of Telemachus: The Main Character of Margaret Cavendish’s Assaulted and Pursued Chastity as the Embodiment of Progress and Conventions

As the Eighth Book of Margaret Cavendish’s (1623–1673) Natures Pictures (1656), “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity” is one of the English writer’s earlier prose works. Labelled as a “tale or discourse” by the author herself, while traditionally referred to as a seventeenth-century romance, the text already displays a kind of formal experimentation and playfulness, as well as many of the progressive ideas the Duchess’ mature literary voice of the 1660s is characterised by. Accordingly, it deals with topics as broad and complicated as, for example, the act (and perils) of travelling, the age-old institute of marriage, the issues brought about by military conflicts, the concept of virtue and the risks of virtuous behaviour, as well as the theory and practice of colonisation. Although critical comments and essays concentrating specifically on “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity” appear to have been few and far between since its original publication – especially when compared to its spiritual successor, The Blazing World (1666) –, the protagonist of the story is often analysed as an early manifestation or prototype of the active, resourceful, travelling female individual. Travelia’s wit, determination, oratory and argumentation skills, accompanied by a somewhat bellicose and combative nature, seem to predict the lasting success of Cavendish’s later heroines, and even the full potential of their writer’s creative powers. In my paper, I intend to take a look at how the main character’s progressive and, to a certain extent, even masculine traits and deeds are juxtaposed with her ultimate decision to adhere to certain cultural conventions of femininity by getting married, focusing mainly on the various ways in which this kind of shift and the ensuing double perspective of the heroine might influence the reading and overall evaluation of “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity.”

Bence Kvéder has been an assistant lecturer at the Institute of English Studies, University of Pécs since 2021. His main field of interest is late 19^th-century and 20^th-century Irish drama, with a special focus on its modernist aspects. His primary field of research is G. B. Shaw’s plays. Writing in both Hungarian and English, he has published articles, reviews, and translations in journals such as FOCUS, The AnaChronisT, Filológiai Közlöny, Literatura, and Műhely. He was co-editor of the conference proceedings Kontaktzónák (2019). [back to top]

Laura Lukács, University of Pécs

Self-Reflexivity and Creating Fancy in The Blazing World of Margaret Cavendish

Through an analysis of a mise en abyme structure, I am to explore the notion of “fancy” understood as a democratic and autonomous conception of creative imagination in The Description of a New World, called The Blazing World (1666) of Margaret Cavendish. In my understanding, the author calls the readers to apply this capacity of their mind to generate new knowledge and to invent possible solutions for collective problems. This way, radical imagination and utopian thinking are closely interlinked in The Blazing World, even if the author’s ideas are in somewhat of a controversy according to the universal applicability, the democratic character of creative imagination. Comparing the 1666 compound edition (reissued in 1668) and the 1668 individual edition, it turns out that in the latter the preface had been remodeled to address an exclusively female readership. In the original preface the reader’s gender remains unspecified, and creative imagination is announced to be at the disposal of everyone, the second one addresses “all noble and worthy Ladies” and cancels the call for the use of fancy. Despite the modification, the text remains rich in illustrations of the illimited power of fancy, so Margaret Cavendish’s radical concept of imagination is still present with all its emancipatory potentials. In my reading, that this is the core theme of the text; I justify this by an analysis of a self-reflexive figure, which can be understood as the emblem of the creation and the reading of The Blazing World itself and serve as an exemplum to the reader to start imagining, thus becoming an author herself.

Laura Klára Lukács (1996, Veszprém) graduated from the teacher training programme of the University of Pécs in June 2023. She teaches French as a foreign language in the Pécsi Leőwey Klára Gimnázium. She is currently studying at the Doctoral School of the University of Pécs. Her primary research field is Comics Studies, but she is also committed to the study of Early Modern Utopian Literature. She is (co)author of several research papers on comics, and a thesis about Margaret Cavendish. [back to top]

Maczelka Csaba, University of Pécs

Aphra Behn and the Poetics of Restoration Prose Fiction

Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684) and Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave (1688) often appear in relevant works as the potential candidates for the glorious title of the “first English novel”. In my paper I do not undertake to make justice to this claim, and recent research on the history of prose fiction and the novel makes any claims about “firstness” dubious at best. Therefore, in my paper I propose to investigate some of Behn’s prose works in the context of Restoration prose fiction, focusing above all on what is often referred to in relevant literature as the generic hybridity (or in a more recent work by Line Cottegnies on Cavendish, as “generic bricolage”) of prose fiction works of the post-Restoration period. The hybridity is certainly interconnected with ongoing debates about the old and the new romance, and later the novel and the romance, as reflected in frequent self-reflexive passages in the works in question. Therefore, in my paper I focus on Behn’s poetics of prose fiction, looking for reflections on genres and techniques, and explore their embeddedness in contemporary debates on fiction.

Csaba Maczelka (PhD, 2014) is an associate professor at the Institute of English Studies at the University of Pécs (Hungary). His primary research area is early modern English literature, particularly the history of sixteenth-seventeenth century English utopias and prose fiction. He published a Hungarian monograph on early modern English utopias and their reception in Hungary (2019), a Hungarian handbook for Thomas More’s Utopia (2020) and its literary context, and numerous English and Hungarian articles about early modern English and Hungarian literature. [back to top]

Ljubica Matek, Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek

Political and Social Activism of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Women’s participation in the public sphere, as writers, politicians, or thinkers, has been severely restricted for centuries. Moreover, their contribution was largely ignored or derided. Indeed, Eileen Hunt Botting highlights that Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of theRights of Woman (1792) “is one of the few political or philosophicaltexts by a woman that is generally recognized as a classic of Westerncivilization” (4). Among women writers who managed to engage in philosophical, social, or political thought despite the social and educational hindrances designed to exclude women from the public arena wasLady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762). The presentation will centrearound her political and social activism, emphasizing the empowering and progressive function of her writings based on several selected texts.Montagu’s letter to Sarah Chiswell in April 1717 outlines her interest in and subsequent contribution to medical science, whereas her poems “Constantinople”and “The Reasons that Induced Dr. Swift to Write a Poem Called ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’”unsettle the notions of the East as backward and espouse criticism of the vain and misogynist English society respectively. By tackling subjects that were considered to be reserved for men and insisting on her writerly authority, Montagu destabilizes the existing gender boundaries and rejects the notions of the Oriental Other as well as the Feminine Other, introducing progressive discourse in eighteenth-century upper-class society.

Keywords: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, woman writer, social engagement, the Other.

Ljubica Matek, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Head of the Centre for Popular Culture at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Osijek, Croatia. She teaches courses in literature at undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate levels. She was a fellow at the University of Louisville (USA), Lancaster University (UK), and Complutense University of Madrid (Spain). Her research interests are broad and include horror and Gothic literature, trauma studies, adaptation studies (literature and film), Shakespeare, and popular culture. She is the author of English Literature in Context. From Romanticism until the Twentieth Century (Filozofski fakultet Osijek, 2020), and the founder and co-editor of a scholarly peer-reviewed blog Fractals: The Shapes of Popular Culture. [back to top]

Simon Rebeka, University of Pécs

Reading in Northanger Abbey and Evelina

“‘It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;’ or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language”: Austen’s well-known advocacy for the novel in her posthumously released work, Northanger Abbey, demonstrates her deep respect for the bestselling female authors of her time. She had access to the library of Godmersham Park “during her six lengthy visits between 1798 and 1813” (Sabor 2019). This library housed copies of Frances Burney’s Evelina, Camilla and Cecilia, as well as Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda. References to these works appear directly or indirectly in many of Austen’s novels as well as her juvenilia. The works of prominent literary figures such as Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth served as inspiration and nurtured her own voice. This paper offers an inquiry into how the reading habits depicted in Northanger Abbey might correspond to those portrayed in Frances Burney’s Evelina.

Rebeka Simon is a postgraduate student at the University of Pécs, specializing in English Literature. Her research topic is reading habits and their effects on character development in the novels of English women writers of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries. Her essay “Readers and Reading in Northanger Abbey: When the Vulgar Reader Enters the World” was published in the volume Specimina Operum Iuvenum 8 (University of Pécs, 2023). [back to top]

Simon Réka Boglárka, University of Pécs

Exploring the Vampiric Motifs in Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon

In 1816, Lady Caroline Lamb’s Gothic novel Glenarvon was published anonymously. The book gave rise to scandal in its wake, stirring reactions both among critics and within the aristocratic society that Lamb satirized. Understandably, Lamb’s social circle was perturbed by the public caricature, while literary critics cautioned against the potential impact of such sensationalistic and indecent content on young female minds. Some even drew comparisons to John Cleland’s Fanny Hill. The central character, Lord Glenarvon, serves as a rather unflattering portrayal of Lamb’s former lover, Lord Byron. This marked the first instance of the Byronic hero appearing outside of Byron’s own works. Clarence de Ruthven’s persona resurfaces in John Polidori’s depiction of Byron embodied in the vampire figure of Lord Ruthven, a character that features in Polidori’s short story The Vampyre. Given that Lady Lamb’s book siginificantly inspired Polidori, it becomes intriguing to re-examine Glenarvon from the perspective of vampire motifs. In this paper, I aim to explore the Gothic and vampiric motifs present in the book and draw comparisons to Polidori’s The Vampyre.

Réka Boglárka Simon is a doctoral student in the programme PhD in British, Irish, and American Literatures in English at the University of Pécs. Her research topic is British and Irish gothic and vampire literature and its representation in the British press. Her essay “The Victorian Perspective on Vampires: vampire stories in nineteenth-century British newspapers” received a special award at the National Scientific Students’ Associations conference (OTDK) in April, 2023.bio] [back to top]

Tóth Orsolya, University of Pécs

The Hungarian Reception of Jane Austen

The reception of Jane Austen in Hungary was notably delayed. In 1934, Sándor Hevesi completed his initial translation of Pride and Prejudice, which was subsequently published in installments by Budapesti Szemle. It took almost three decades for Austen’s novels to be compiled into book form, making them accessible to a broader audience. Nonetheless, as Nóra Séllei asserts, there are indications of relatively early visibility. In the 19th century, Austen’s novels were already present in the libraries of certain Hungarian families. This presentation aims to enhance our understanding of the somewhat fragmented reception of Jane Austen in Hungary during the 19th century. Various sources contribute to this exploration, including the summary of English literary history edited by Ferenc Toldy, lexicon entries, critical comments on Jane Austen, Sándor Kégl’s history of English literature, and the image of Jane Austen published at the turn of the century.

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