| I investigate the development of the Modernist, experimental novel in the context of British, Hungarian, and Romanian literary traditions. The interwar period was fraught with conflicts concerning nationhood and ethnic and minority rights in a Europe whose boundaries had been completely rearranged after the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. These debates were particularly important in East-Central Europe, where the newly re-drawn national boundaries influenced cultural and textual production, transmission, and reception. The three authors whose works I compare were contemporaries and produced their most innovative fiction during this period. I explore these authors' late novels from three different angles: Woolf's from the perspective of music, Caragiale's from that of the visual arts, and Kosztolanyi's from that of language. In my final, comparative chapter, I draw on the interface of music, painting, and language in order to show that, while emerging from vastly different cultural and linguistic traditions, these writers' late fictional experiments share striking similarities that complicate the relationship between center and periphery. The nature of my comparison questions traditional views of the novel as a genre that developed in Western Europe and was simply imitated by the periphery, and challenges dominant/subaltern models of literary transmission and reception. |
