Retrospection: Feminist Literary Perspective Then – And Now?

Abstract

The article, written on the occasion of the author's acceptance of the Margit Kaffka Prize in 2023, is a retrospective analysis of the state of feminist literary studies in Hungary before 2014, and also a comparison of this pre-2014 state with the present one. Specifically, it studies, through three aspects, what has changed, in terms of the attitudes towards feminist projects and perspectives, in the study of 20th-21st century Hungarian literature and in the contemporary Hungarian literary field in general since the 1990s. The article briefly discusses the differences with the help of three analytical perspectives, namely the following: 1) the role of the so-called anti-political discourse within the study of 20th-21st Hungarian literature, the main assumptions of this discourse about the feminist literary profession, and the impacts of these assumptions on the feminist ways of “doing literary studies” in Hungary. 2) The differences in the meaning constructions of feminism and the feminist ways of “doing politics” that were/are available in the Hungarian public sphere in the two time periods, and how and to what extent these meaning constructions impacted the understanding of feminism by the literary profession. 3) Access to major professional platforms by feminist literary critics and women writers, the contrast between the pre-2014 “journal-based” Hungarian literary culture and its gate-keeping techniques, and authors’ current struggles for attention in today’s largely internet-based literary culture. The article also briefly discusses the changed institutional framework around today’s literature, which, simultaneously with the decline of the journal-based literary culture, poses a completely different set of challenges for both feminist literary scholars and for contemporary women writers in Hungary.