Slavonic and East European Review, 96, 2, 2018 Reviews Kiséry, András; Komáromy, Zsolt and Varga, Zsuzsanna (eds). Worlds of Hungarian Writing: National Literature as Intercultural Exchange. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Rowman & Littlefield, Madison andTeaneck,NJ,Lanham,MDandLondon,2016.xi+284pp.Illustrations. Notes. Bibliographical references. Index. $90.00: £60.00. Edited and written by international scholars of a Hungarian background affiliated with prestigious universities of two continents, Worlds of Hungarian Writing fulfils and over-fulfils every expectation raised by the title. Providing a near-comprehensive overview of two centuries’ worth of ongoing cultural and literary exchange between a smallish East-Central European nation and the (mostly) English-speaking West, this collection of twelve thematically interrelated essays also caters to readers with a general interest in a whole range of long-established or newly emerging disciplines and research areas. Whether drawing on relevant findings offered by comparative literature, translation theory or memory studies, employing politically committed approaches exemplified by feminist or postcolonial criticism, adding their authors’ insight to developing areas such as intermediality or area studies, each and every chapter in the volume is informed by its writer’s commitment to engaging the reader of whatever academic orientation in a meaningful dialogue with the texts and contexts under examination. This is not to say that those with an expert’s interest in Hungarian or East-Central European studies will not find chapters of particular relevance in Worlds of Hungarian Writing. Scholars whose research is focused on the nineteenth century will want to start with the first four of the chronologically arranged chapters, first delving into Zsolt Komáromy’s treatment of the culturally-coded reasons why such emblematic first-generation English Romantics as William Wordsworth failed to register in Hungary’s cultural memory. The same readers are likely to go on to Veronika Ruttkay’s discussion of how nineteenth-century Hungary’s favourite Scottish poet Robert Burns was domesticated by two of Hungary’s foremost poet-translators of the period, János Arany and József Lévay, each intent on fitting Burns’s demotic diction into his own, peculiar, conception of his country’s ascendant popular-national aesthetic. Literary translation being a highly regarded cultural activity at a time reform-driven, post-revolutionary Hungary was striving to catch up with its perceived cultural betters in the West, Zsuzsa Varga’s introduction of three notable female translators — two aristocratic exiles in London and her country’s first ‘woman of letters’ in Pest-Buda (p. 87) — mediating between their shared homeland’s various ethnic cultures here and those of Germany, Britain, or America there is of as much relevance to historical feminism as it is to Hungarian studies. REVIEWS 325 What emerges from these chapters is that regardless of their class, politics or even gender, Hungary’s leading intellectuals in the period were all bent on adapting the cultural imports arriving from English- and German-speaking countries to the needs of their native country’s identity-formation on the one hand and, especially in the case of Theresa Pulszky and Júlia Jósika, those two progressive patriots in Varga’s chapter, on counteracting the defamatory propaganda spread abroad by forces hostile to Hungary’s national aspirations, on the other. Broadening the book’s perspective in yet another direction, Júlia Bácskai-Atkári’s contribution demonstrates how the poetic form initiated by Byron with Don Juan and Pushkin with Eugene Onegin solidified into nineteenth-century Hungary’s well-defined, prolific, and long-lived verse novel even as the genre faded out of its native environment. Bácskai-Atkári’s study will invite comparison within English literature between the Byronic original and its twentieth-century descendants the verse narratives of David Jones or Anthony Burgess among others. If the informed reader finds some smaller lacunae in these chapters’ argumentation, they will have that much greater incentive to continue with the research begun by the scholars contributing to Worlds of Hungarian Writing. Issues calling for further inquiry include the conundrum why all the Lake Poets were pre-emptively forgotten in nineteenth-century Hungary when only one of them, Wordsworth, was charged with triviality and vulgarity by the country...