Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. [Vol. 5.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 25)

Book reviews - László Dányi: Methods and History: A Milestone in American Studies in Hungary. (Vadon Lehel: Az amerikai irodalom és irodalomtudomány bibliográfiája a magyar időszaki kiadványokban 1990-ig)

History) accomplishes the aim of establishing an up-to-date synthesis of Hungarian literature, but it fails to involve foreign literature in its scope of observation. Some bibliographies treating individual foreign authors and particular periods of literary history have been published, but they have always been compiled without the author's intention of supplying a complete bibliography of sources. Up until the 1960s, owing to politico-ideological reasons and to lack of interest, American studies in Hungary accomplished modest results, and it did not carry out an extensive research in the field of registering sources of American literature in Hungary, and this failure obstructed the development of reception research and the exploration and exploitation of American-Hungarian relations. It was László Országh, who first endeavored to found a retrospective bibliography of American literature and literary studies. Under his encouragement and guidance at Lajos Kossuth University doctoral dissertations were written on the Hungarian reception of American authors and literary tendencies, and the first bibliographies were the products of serendipity, as they were derived from those dissertations. Until 1990 only ten bibliographies were published in Hungarian periodicals. The publication of Vadon's current anthology was preceded by fifteen years of meticulous research and, as he remarks in the preface to his bibliography, assembling data from all possible sources required looking through the pages of 1619 different kinds of periodicals ranging from the publication of the first Hungarian periodicals (Magyar Hírmondó, 1780; Magyar Könyv-Ház, 1783; Magyar Mitsa, 1786) to 1990. When collecting data, he considered each Hungarian literary publication and examined periodicals that were not born purely in the field of belles-lettres or literary criticism but the ones that are of interest and of value for the literary historian. Furthermore, he focused his attention onto Hungarian publications from the territory of historical Hungary and from other countries. Vadon conducted a bibliographic exploration into every area of American studies in Hungary: he listed all the literary works by American authors in Hungarian periodicals (primary sources), and he treats studies, essays, reviews and book reports, critical comments and articles (secondary sources). Besides registering belles-lettres and literary criticism, the bibliography encapsulates those publications of cultural history, publicism, bibliographical literature and other fields of science that are closely linked to the literary life of the United 124