Urban Culture and the Modern City

When consulting key works on urban studies, the absence of Central and Eastern European cities is striking. Cities such as Vienna, Budapest, Prague, and Trieste, where such notable figures as Freud, Ferenczi, Kafka, and Joyce lived and worked, are rarely studied in a translocal framework, as if Central and Eastern Europe were still a blind spot of European modernity. This volume expands the scope of literary urban studies by focusing on Budapest and Hungarian small towns, offering in-depth analyses of the intriguing link between literature, the arts, and material culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. This collection of essays situates Hungarian urban culture within the global flow of ideas, investigating emerging local narratives as they explore the period of modernism, the mid-century, and the post-1989 era in a context that moves well beyond the borders of the country.