Foreword: a Writer in Search of Her Foremothers / Nadezhda Alexandrova and Suzan van Dijk -- Acknowledgements -- List of Illustrations -- Translator's Note -- 1. A Tradition of One's Own : A Tradition of Forgetting -- Canons and Sinking Streams -- Women's Literature -- My Own Say -- From Room to Room, All the Way to My Own Room -- A Portrait Gallery on the Museum's Postcard -- 2. Between Love and the Canon: Renée Erdős (1879- 1956) : Author's House: Closed -- Private Life - Literary Life -- Woman Writer at the Journal Future -- The Woman Writer's Chances -- Voices in the Novels -- Fracture -- Success in Her Time -- Contemporary Reviews -- The Label of Erotic Lady Author -- Female Voice, Female Verse -- The Author's House Is Open -- 3. In the Canon with Secrets: Ágnes Nemes Nagy (1922- 1991) and the Women's Literary Tradition : The Weeping Poetess -- Secret Poems and the Writing of Literary History -- The Female Poet and Objective Poetry -- Woman's Room, Woman's Landscape, Woman's Body -- Self- Liquidation and Recognition -- A Woman's Role -- Statue and Mask -- Women's Poetic Tradition -- Contents -- Entering the Room -- Epilogue -- 4. No Canon for Otherness - The Witch: Minka Czóbel (1854- 1943) : The Enigmatic Monographer -- The Mysterious Bob -- Detective Work -- Painting a Portrait -- Writing between the Lines -- Ugly, Ugly, Not Fit for the Canon -- Contemporary Views of Minka Czóbel -- The Feminist Witch -- The Otherness of the Witch -- Loss of Control -- Perversion, Horror, Revenge, Web -- Boundaries, Mirrors -- Reading the Witch -- 5. Mirror, Body, Trauma - A Writer's Wife at the Edge of the Canon: Ilona Harmos Kosztolányi (1885- 1967) : To Big Girls about Little Girls -- Widow, Pigeonholed: the Writer's Wife -- Female Reading -- Body -- Mirror -- Women's Holocaust Memoirs -- Trauma: Persecutors and Persecuted -- Setting the Stage for Death -- Connections: Ilona Harmos, Minka Czóbel, Dezső Kosztolányi, Ágnes Nemes Nagy -- The Writing Woman -- Sitting Down at the Writing Desk -- 6. Museum, Cult, Memory - Locked in the Canon: Lesznai (1885- 1966) : Memory's Volunteers -- The Well- Known Woman Writer -- Museum, Cult, Memory -- Dusting Off a Novel -- Belatedness and Renewal -- Threads and Patterns -- Female Figures -- A Father's Blessing -- The Novel that Remembers -- Nižný Hrušov - Memory's Touch -- Appendix 1: List of Poems and Their Translators -- Appendix 2: A List of Titles of Works Referred to in English and in Hungarian. "In Women's Literary Tradition and Twentieth-Century Hungarian Writers, Anna Menyhért presents the cases of five women writers whose legacy literary criticism has [been] neglected or distorted, thereby depriving succeeding Hungarian generations of vital cultural memory and the inspiration that [they] bring. The bold voices of poets Renée Erdős and Minka Czóbel challenged gender norms in relation to sex and relationships. Ágnes Nemes Nagy, celebrated for her 'masculine' poems, felt she must suppress her 'feminine' poems. Famous writer's widow Ilona Harmos Kosztolányi's autobiographical writing tackles the physical challenges of girl's adolescence, and offers us a woman's thoughtful Holocaust narrative. Anna Lesznai, émigrée and visual artist, drew on techniques from the crafts of patchworking and embroidery in structuring her family saga"--
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