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)

discuss shifts in the writing of the three authors, comparing as well as contrasting their varied artistic responses to the threatening outside world in terms of narrative structure and discourse. Both books have remained milestones in Hungarian scholarship, reviewed and cited by several Hungarian critics. James Joyce és Thomas Mann had Tibor Szobotka, the translator of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into Hungarian among its first reviewers. In Szobotka's words, the book is "valuable both as a Joyce monograph and as a work [that] never fails to grasp the important connections, and sees all phenomena in the multiplied relation and reflection of parallel, precedent and consequence" (287). Closer to our time, in his analysis of Hemingway's Fiesta Zoltán Abádi Nagy refers to the significant artistic links between that novel and the preceding volume of short stories as first propounded by Egri's book on the writer (195). The individual author and work renewing tradition is, of course, an idea discussed in T. S. Eliot's essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), which Egri paid particular attention to already in his first writing on the poet, a contribution to the collection Az angol irodalom a huszadik században (English Literature in the Twentieth Century) (1970). Eliot's was another modernist achievement he could not possibly ignore in his dedicated investigation of how artists represented chaos and loss as aspects of twentieth century experience, and completed a further paper titled "T. S. Eliot's Aesthetics" for the 1974 issue of Hungarian Studies in English published by the Debrecen English Department. Continuing the same line of inquiry, in 1981 Egri selected and edited a collection of Eliot's essays in Hungarian, to which he wrote an introduction that expounds the nature of the various intellectual challenges demonstrated by the writer. Years later, in "Reflections on T. S. Eliot's Vers Libre," an article appearing in a volume of centenary essays published in England Egri contended that "The crucial problem of genre theory [...] is of a complex nature and therefore requires a complex approach. It is a remarkable thing that two such different authors as T. S. Eliot and G. Lukács show a conspicuous point of contact in tackling the problem" (164). This statement but highlights, in retrospect, that the marxist theoretical perspective characteristic of the early period of Egri's scholarship was by no means a narrowly understood and rigidly 15