The present study is part of a series of analyses that attempt to chart a new field of minority studies through the interpretation of works that depict old age as a vulnerable condition. It therefore begins by addressing the question of which specific theoretical domains are engaged when old age is presented as a minor experience. The theoretical inquiry is followed by four analyses of texts by Magda Szabó, Tibor Déry, Iván Mándy, and Miklós Mészöly, of which the latter two are included here. These four works come from representative authors of the Kádár era—writers with very different social backgrounds and worldviews—who, through their portrayals of old age as a minority experience, also respond to their own age and its relation to the past. Even on this basis, it becomes clear that issues concerning socio-political relations, history, and memory will be particularly observable in these writings. At the same time, the comparison proves promising because the four authors, in terms of their artistic methods, span a wide spectrum—from traditional psychological realism to variants of late modern prose poetics—leading to very different strategies in narrating the experience of old age.

This study examines the roots of modern literature’s emergence in 18th-century Hungarianspeaking territories through the evolving concept of fiction. The author argues that fiction, in its contemporary sense, did not exist previously, and substantiates this claim by employinga rhetorical-historical and epistemological approach. According to Stefan Trappen, modern literature, by virtue of the concept of fiction, frees itself from its tether to reality, thereby distinguishing fictionality from the true/false dichotomy. Over time, the argumentum gradually faded from the triad of historia, fabula, and argumentum. István Bartók and István Vadai suggest that fabula functioned as a tool, a source of exemplum, reinforcing the truth of historia. In contrast, within the older system, argumentum would have represented fiction. In the epistemological section, a preface to a 1777 Aesop collection discusses the concepts of veritas logica and falsitas logica. It explains the utility of “untrue speech” (falsiloquium) by referencing Plato. As long as thoughts were considered perfect images and the aim was to evoke an effect, fiction in the modern sense did not exist. Before the 18th-century paradigm shift, certain knowledge only allowed for the unequivocal separation of truth and falsehood.

Since 2005, the Institute for Literary Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (currently HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities) has been preparing a new companion volume for Hungarian literature. Based on the initiating role of former institute director László Szörényi, the study presents the outline of the preliminary concept of the 18th-century volume. The main goal of the concept is to draw attention to the reorganizations taking place between the era of old and modern literature, and to confront the heterogeneous phenomena that exist side by side at the same time. Another goal is to understand Hungarian literature of the century along the lines of the problems which arose in the international scholarship on European literary history, and to place it in the foreground of literary thinking. The aim is also to present in detail the separation process of litterae and literature, the change in meaning of contemporary literary concepts, the institutionalization of literature and theantecedents and development of the concept of „fiction”. The starting point is a pragmatic concept of literature, according to which it is a system of literary works including the processes of creation, transmission and reception, as well as functions and contexts.

The literary magazine Orpheu was launched in 1915, as the first forum of the Portuguese Modernismo sought to modernize the semi-peripheral cultural field of the nation by bringing it into synchronicity with contemporary European tendencies. The short-lived periodical also proposed to rewrite the prevailing hierarchies of world literature and aimed to transform Portugal into an authentic center of modernist art and literature. These ambitious aspirations on the one hand were in harmony with the main concerns of the Portuguese intelligentsia at the beginning of the 20th century, and on the other hand, reflected the core ideas of Fernando Pessoa’s literary project. Orpheu, hence, stands out from the avant-garde periodical scene of the decade: 1) for having a unique transmodernist profile that integrates the aestheticist tendencies of the fin du siècle with the experimentalism of the emerging avant-garde movements; and 2) for presenting itself as an authentic laboratory of simulation which questioned the traditional concept of the author in line with Pessoa’s heteronymy.

The historical study of popularity functions as a parallel system alongside literary historiography. In essence, it represents a branch of cultural studies situated at the crossroads of several disciplines. Its scope encompasses both ancient and modern folklore, the deeprooted origins of mass culture, and their respective musical, ethnographic, art historical, and historical contexts. The forthcoming volume of the Hungarian literary history handbook dedicated to the eighteenth century includes numerous phenomena that show parallels with international popular literature and its publications (e.g., popular print materials), although in several cases these parallels are temporally displaced. The present essay is grounded in the observation that among the imitative-variational techniques of the archaic concept of litterae, it was precisely the popular genres that had the greatest opportunity to preserve earlier operational principles into the new literary paradigm — the era of literature. This process unfolds along two principal lines: 1. Genres of popular poetry served as models for certain works of later elite literature (e.g., during Romanticism). 2. Popular poetry sought access to the printed public sphere just as elite literature did. Through the widespread dissemination of popular printed materials (such as chapbooks, almanacs, etc.), this development led to the emergence of a distinctive neo-litterae, which continues to shape popular culture to this day.

In the last decade, research on literary multilingualism has mainly analysed the distinction between latent and explicit representations, and in the case of explicit representations, the mode, function and poetic implications of code switching and code mixing representations have often been at the forefront. This paper focuses on explicit forms of literary multilingualism, not on language mixing or language shifting in the speech of characters, but on the textual functions of code mixing in narrative texts, which both create and mediate transcultural situations. The chosen text is Thomas Perle’s short story cycle wir gingen weil alle gingen, which brings aspects of multilingualism in relation to Romanian, Hungarian and German to the fore at the level of the narrower (family) and the wider (regional) community. The chosen German text shows differences in the representation and use of multilingualism compared to many contemporary texts, since the words and expressions of the foreign language, the other language, are integrated into the text much more organically – often due to the techniques or lack of translation – than in the case of novel or short story texts, where foreign language elements are dissolved at every occurrence. The paper will attempt to examine this phenomenon in detail.