Urban narratives in Hungarian literature: The prose fiction of Budapest, 1873-1939

This thesis examines ways in which Hungarian writers depicted their capital city, Budapest, in the years between the creation of Budapest in 1873 and the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, and discusses ways in which these literary representations of the city contributed to wider constructions of identity and difference. During this period, at the same time as Hungarian society became increasingly dominated by its rapidly expanding capital city, it also became more receptive to anti-urban sentiments. The late nineteenth-century explosion in population and publishing created a substantial body of new writing. Budapest came to represent everything that was new, and formed the context for broader discussions of morality, belonging, assimilation, race, and the nature and purpose of art. A thematic approach traces the development of urban narratives and tropes over time, and in each chapter, I discuss a number of works in social and literary- historical context. My argument is that Hungarian authors, despite their best efforts, failed to write the city in convincingly simplistic terms: the greater the urge to impose a form of logic or an ideology on the city, the less successful its realisation