Romanian and Hungarian Otherness. A World-System Perspective on the Event Novel

Romanian and Hungarian Otherness. A World-System Perspective on the Event Novel. The article aims to investigate how the combined and unequal world-system is reflected in two peripheral novels in the modern literary system that focus on the Romanian-Hungarian 1919 military conflict, as part of the First World War. The Death of a Red Republic Moartea unei Republici Roșii by Felix Aderca and Anna Édes by Dezső Kosztolányi are comparatively discussed in order to see how regional and (semi-)peripheral literatures articulate the dynamics of world-systems and geographies of uneven development. The event novel, both recipient and generator of tensions and socio-economic, political, and cultural change, is representative of the articulation of imaginary patterns regarding otherness. In this sense, the article investigates how “frontier Orientalism” is activated in the narrative of the war and how this imaginary reflects the inequalities within the world system. Keywords: world-system theories, frontier Orientalism, imaginary, subgenre, Romanian literature, Hungarian literature