Central European Contributions, 2005–2008

This section covers scholarship published in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia from 2005 through 2008. We acknowledge with gratitude the cooperation of Raili Põldsaar, who provided the refereed material from Estonia. The annotation of studies published in the Czech Republic and Slovakia was procured through the generous cooperation of Jaroslav Kušnír of the University of Prešov, Slovakia.

a. General: Literary and Cultural History, Bibliography

In Hungary, a major scholarly achievement of the period is the single-authored history of American literature, Enikő Bollobás's Az amerikai irodalom története (Budapest: Osiris, 2005), the first American literary history since László Országh published his pioneering work in 1967 (supplemented with new chapters in 1997 by Zsolt Virágos). Bollobás's 874-page survey of American literature from its native precolonial beginnings to the end of the 20th century is innovative in two respects: first, it emphasizes the pluralism of American writing by exploring not only the all too familiar "great books" of the mainstream canon but also avant-garde experimentation and the multicultural contributions of previously muted groups; second, it surveys the multiplicity of interpretive positions while also offering new and often original interpretations informed by recent criticism and theory.

In the Czech Republic, Šárka Bubíková, Literatura v Americe, Amerika v literatuře: Proměny amerického literárního kánonu (Pardubice: Nakladatelství Pavel Mervart, 2007), focuses on the American literary canon, its theories, and its relationship to power structures, academia, literary criticism, and readers. Analyzing thematic criteria that have contributed to the canon-formation process, such as identity, individualism, and the idea of Americanness, Bubíková reads several important American novels whose canonical status has changed recently.

Lehel Vadon, after publishing in this period two journal articles and six individual volumes detailing the full Hungarian bibliographies of several important writers—Walt Whitman (Eger: EKF, 2005), The American Renaissance (Eger: EKF, 2005), "Arthur Miller" (HJEAS 11, ii [2005]: 169–227), Mark Twain (Eger: EKF, 2006), Jack London (Eger: EKF, 2006), American Dramatists (Eger: EKF, 2006), T. S. Eliot (Eger: EKF, 2008), and "Sylvia Plath" (Focus [2008]: 93–123)—has completed his massive three-volume bibliography of American literature and literary scholarship in Hungary, Az amerikai irodalom és irodalomtudomány bibliográfiája Magyarországon 2000-ig (Eger: EKF Líceum, 2007). These three volumes, each well over a thousand pages, collect in a total of 51,408 bibliographical entries (books, book chapters, essays, journal articles) all the primary and critical sources on a total of 2,371 American authors, attesting to the continued readerly and critical attention given to American literature in Hungary.

b. Topical Studies, Commemorative and Anniversary Volumes

In Poland the proceedings of the 2004 Annual Conference of Polish Association for American Studies, American Freedoms—American (Dis)Orders, ed. Zbigniew Lewicki (Warsaw: American Studies Center, 2005), brings together essays on the recurrent motif of the concept of individual freedom in the collective American mind. The range of essays varies from strictly political in character, such as Marek Wilczyński's "The Idea of Order in Cambridge, Mass.: Richard Henry Dana, Sr.'s Romantic Defense of Tradition" (pp. 341–47) and Karol Derwich's "An American Dream—Reality for a Few: The Cuban Immigration in Miami" (pp. 49–56), through classical literary criticism papers, such as Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis's "Double Standards in the Aristocratic South: An Ironic Portrayal of Selective Freedoms in Ellen Glasgow's Fiction" (pp. 227–42) and Liubou Piarvushyna's "Confronting the Problems of Gender in Erica Jong's Creative Works" (pp. 243–51), to discussions covering the broad fields of American culture, ethnic and gender studies, and media, such as Aleksandra M. Różalska's "American Freedoms vs. Exclusion of the Other in American News: The Case of African Americans" (pp. 269–80), Agnieszka Bedingfield's "Gendering U.S. Immigration Policy: Asian Americans on (Dis)orderly Genders and Citizenship" (pp. 31–40), and Grażyna Zygadło's "Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother: The Changing Dynamics of Contemporary...