Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Mária Kurdi: "Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain." On the Scholarly Heritage of Péter Egri (1932-2002)

novelistic and the short story forms and the interaction of realism and naturalism. The other book, titled James Joyce és Thomas Mann: Dekadencia és modemség (James Joyce and Thomas Mann: Decadence and Modernity) provides detailed comparisons of the two outstanding writers' respective works in the context of the both diverse and diverging ambitions of modernism. From the beginning of his career, the incentive to view genres and works in relation to each other, while also interrogating them against certain models, paradigms, and their representative artistic manifestations, has established its own creative tradition in Egri's scholarly activity. In an interview conducted with him on the occasion of his 70th birthday in Janaury 2002, he outlined a periodization of his whole ouevre himself, based on the nature and corollary of the issues he was intrigued by at the time of writing his major book-length studies (Kurdi 130-31). According to this thoughtful self-assessment and the testimony of Egri's works themselves, the roughly four decades of his activity as literary historian and critic can be divided into four periods. None of these, however, is clearly independent from the others, they are linked by acts of developing, refocusing and expanding the issues initially problematized. Egri's scholarly oeuvre is a firm construction that was gradually rising higher while growing in breadth and strength during his career. The roads and paths taken by his inquisitive scholarship can be seen as criss-crossing each other while all leading towards the "rich garners," to borrow from the lyrical vocabulary of John Keats' sonnet "When I Have Fears" (152), which now store the products of thought and ambitious inquiry in the form of individual essays, collections and books. Interrogating Modernism During the frist period, which fell between 1959 and 1972, Egri claimed to have been interested in what ways and by what means of representation literary works addressed the crucial, often dissonant experiences of the twentieth century, so that they not just break with, but also transcend and renew tradition. As he argued, it was the synthetizing achievement of Béla Bartók's modernist music that provided some kind of model for him to pinpoint the possibility of this delicate balance in the domain of literature (Kurdi 130). Considered in this light, the similarity of the first two books is unmistakable: they 14