The Narrative Properties of the 19Th-Century Verse Novel
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Julia Bacskai-Atkari The Narrative Properties of the 19th-Century Verse Novel Julia Bacskai-Atkari The Narrative Properties of the 19th-Century Verse Novel Reflexive Structure, Intertextuality and Generic History Hamburg University Press Verlag der Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky Zugl.: Dissertation, Universität Hamburg, 2018 u. d. T. The Narrative Properties of the 19th-century Verse Novel BIBLIOGRAFISCHE INFORMATION DER DEUTSCHEN NATIONALBIBLIOTHEK Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über https://portal.dnb.de abrufbar. ONLINE-AUSGABE Die Online-Ausgabe dieses Werkes ist eine Open-Access-Publikation und ist auf den Verlagswebseiten frei verfügbar. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek hat die Online-Ausgabe archiviert. Diese ist dauerhaft auf dem Archivserver der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek (https://portal.dnb.de) verfügbar. DOI https://dx.doi.org/10.15460/HUP.HHD.005.201 PRINTAUSGABE ISBN 978-3-943423-75-4 LIZENZ Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Das Werk steht unter der Creative-Commons-Lizenz Namensnennung 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.de). Ausgenommen von der oben genannten Lizenz sind Teile, Abbildungen und sonstiges Drittmaterial, wenn anders gekennzeichnet. GESTALTUNG Merle Papenfuß SCHRIFT Alegreya. Copyright 2011: The Alegreya Project Authors (https://github.com/huertatipografica/ Alegreya). This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. This license is also available with a FAQ at: http://scripts.sil.org/OFL DRUCK UND BINDUNG Books on Demand - Norderstedt VERLAG Hamburg University Press, Verlag der Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky, Hamburg (Deutschland), 2019 http://hup.sub.uni-hamburg.de Abstract This book investigates the narrative properties of the 19th-century verse novel. The genre grew out of Lord Byron’s Don Juan and established itself in various European literatures, with famous examples such as Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. The proposed analysis is unique in the existing literature in defining the genre based on formal properties and in examining its exceptional, reflexive structure in detail. Apart from 19th-century texts, verse novels from contemporary literature are also included, and thus the connection between these two contexts is discussed for the first time ex- tensively. Zusammenfassung Das Buch untersucht die narrativen Eigenschaften des Versromans des 19. Jahrhun- derts. Das Genre basiert auf Lord Byrons Don Juan und hat sich in verschiedenen europäischen Literaturen etabliert, mit berühmten Beispielen wie Puschkins Eugen Onegin. Die vorgeschlagene Analyse ist indem sie das Genre auf einer formalen Basis definiert und dessen außergewöhnliche, reflexive Erzählstruktur detailliert unter- sucht, auf der gegenwärtigen wissenschaftlichen Basis einzigartig. Neben den Tex- ten aus dem 19. Jahrhundert werden auch Versromane aus der Gegenwartsliteratur berücksichtigt und damit die Verbindung zwischen diesen zwei Kontexten zum ers- ten Mal ausführlich diskutiert. Acknowledgements This dissertation could not have been written without the support, encouragement and inspiration I received from various people in the last few years. While it is impos- sible to list all of them here, I will at least try to mention as many of them as I can. First, I owe innumerable thanks to my supervisor, István Margócsy, who has encouraged me ever since I was an MA student and whose helpful and critical re- marks have certainly led to many important findings presented in this thesis. Apart from his indispensable support regarding literary history, I would like to thank him for taking it well that I ultimately chose to become a linguist. Many thanks go to Beáta Wagner-Nagy, my supervisor in Hamburg, for all her help and for the boundless patience that she demonstrated while I was preparing my dissertation. I would also like to thank Tiborc Fazekas for his indispensable help and encouragement, which proved to be vital for my choice of doing my PhD in Hamburg. I am indebted to Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, who was the programme leader of the Romanticism programme during my doctoral studies at ELTE, and who has given me many insights into the far-reaching impact of Byron on European poetry in general and on Hungarian poetry in particular, and for explicitly encouraging me to provide an analysis of the genre of the verse novel based on formal grounds. I can only hope that my work would meet his expectations; unfortunately, I will never know. This dissertation is dedicated to his memory. Special thanks go to Márton Fábián, who was in fact the first person to point out Hungarian verse novels to me and without whose excellent classes in literature I probably would not have developed my interest in the subject to the same degree. I owe many thanks to Géza Kállay for his helpful remarks and suggestions dur- ing the earliest days of my dissertation work. Extra thanks go to Gábor Vaderna, who was one of the first critical readers of my papers and whose questions have en- couraged me to take new directions. I would also like to thank György Eisemann and Márton Szilágyi for their suggestions concerning my dissertation proposal that I presented at the Department of 18th–19th-century Hungarian Literature of ELTE. Many thanks go to Dóra Csikós, Bálint Gárdos, Ágnes Péter and Veronika Ruttkay from the Department of English Studies, for their inspiring remarks concerning my studies on Byron and Scott. Extra thanks go to Zsuzsanna Simonkay for her excel- lent suggestions concerning my paper on Scott in the volume she co-edited. I am highly grateful to Balázs Szigeti for being an excellent fellow doctoral stu- dent and a dear friend. And I would definitely like to thank Kata Dobás in particular, who assigned me some interesting philological work in the project of the critical edi- tion of Dezső Kosztolányi, thereby indirectly fostering my skills in sitting in the li- brary for hours. This proved to be essential when I was checking the accuracy of the quotations used in my dissertation. On a slightly different note, I would like to thank my colleagues at the Depart- ment of Linguistics at the University of Potsdam, where I did my first PhD (in gen- eral linguistics) back in 2014 and where I am currently employed as a research fellow, as principal investigator of my own project. Most of them still have no idea that I have been secretly working on my second dissertation for some years now; never- theless, I think it is important to mention that, being the fun and smart people they are, they have provided an excellent working environment for me, which has surely contributed to my increased motivation in life in general. My work has benefited a lot from the comments of anonymous reviewers of my papers submitted during my doctoral project. Equally, I owe many thanks to the au- diences of the conferences I attended (and some members of the audiences in par- ticular), of which I would like to mention the following here: “10th HUSSE Confer- ence” in 2011 in Piliscsaba, “125 Years of English at Eötvös Loránd University” in 2011 in Budapest, “Northrop Frye 100: A Danubian Perspective” in 2012 in Budapest (and Miklós Takács in particular), the session “Comparable and Incomparable Literary Objects?” of “20th Congress of the International Comparative Literature Associa- tion” in Paris in 2013 (and Péter Hajdu in particular), the session “Language – The essence of world literature” of the “21st Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association” in Vienna in 2016 (and Cristina Elgue-Martini in particular), and the session “The language of thematics” of the “21st Congress of the Interna- tional Comparative Literature Association” in Vienna in 2016. I certainly owe many thanks to the cooks of Thomas-Eck in Berlin, who most probably do not know me but who never failed to prepare excellent Berliner Kalbsleber when I was far too tired to do so at home. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their support, encouragement and love, and for being the charming and fun people that they are. I owe lots of thanks to my parents, for their caring love ever since I was born, and for including literature as part of my intellectual and emotional education from very early on. Also, many thanks for continued walks and Wiener Schnitzel in Vienna, even when it is 30 de- grees. Special thanks go to the family dachshunds Fanni and Lujza, whose diligence in digging holes in Wienerwald served as an example to me when I had to be at least equally diligent in carrying out the hard-core philological work. And extra thanks go to our late dachsie Emma, for her irresistible attitude to life and for sorting out an outdated monograph by chewing its cover. Accordingly, this monograph is not in- cluded in the references. My final and most special thanks go to Ralf Ditsch, for continued support in IT- related matters, for more cups of coffee than what was mentioned in my first dis- sertation, and, most importantly, for his love and for just being the truly wonderful person he is. A note on the texts and translations The quotations in the present dissertation are taken from the editions given in the list of primary sources. Whenever possible, a critical edition was used: in the case of Byron’s works, this is the one edited by Jerome J. McGann. Regarding the Hungar- ian texts, more than one critical edition was available in some cases: when there was a choice, I always took the newer edition. For many of the authors discussed here, no critical edition exists (this is obviously so with contemporary authors): in these cases, I took either the first edition or a philologically accurate and annotated edi- tion. The two exceptions in this respect are Balázs Szálinger and Ferenc Juhász, as I took the first edition for each containing a synthesis of their narrative poetic works.