David Clare

Andrew C. Rouse

Csaba Maczelka

Gabriella Hartvig

The volume Across Borders and Time: Jonathan Swift contains the papers delivered at the conference The World of Swift; Swift and his World, which was dedicated to the 350th anniversary of the birth of Jonathan Swift. The conference was held on 24-25 November 2017, at the House of Arts and Literature, Pécs, and jointly organised by the Institute of English Studies of Pécs University and SPECHEL, the latter of which is also the publisher of this volume in its series, SPECHEL e-ditions. It also benefited from the support provided by the Irish Embassy in Budapest. That year also marked the 650th anniversary of Hungary’s first university, founded in Pécs in 1367, and so the conference honoured that event, too. In this, the fifth SPECHEL e-dition, series editor Rouse joins up once again with SPECHEL member Gabriella Hartvig, an internationally respected scholar of the period and colleague at Pécs University, together with Irish Swiftian scholar David Clare. The volume comprises a selection of essays emanating from papers delivered at the conference celebrating the 350th anniversary of the Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift, held in the anniversary year of 2017, and includes a paper delivered by the Irish Ambassador to Hungary that opened the conference. We are grateful to the Irish Embassy for their financial support, as well as to a number of local businesses and the Mayor’s Office of Pécs. The conference was organised by SPECHEL as part of the British and Irish Autumn 2017 series of events, and included a recital of the music of the Irish harper Turlough O’Carolan (1670-1738).

ACROSS BORDERS AND TIME: JONATHAN SWIFT

David Atkinson

Ethnic Mobility in Ballads is the fourth volume in the new SPECHEL e-ditions series. It comprises studies about ballads that in different ways reflect the movement of ethnic groups, transcending and defying national borders in ways that range from the borrowing of ‘national’ heroes to popular interpretations (and distortions) of ethnicities not one’s own, to the transfer of humour from one ethnicity to another. The studies are the result of the 44th International Ballad Conference of the Kommission für Volksdichtung, held in 2014 in Pécs, a city in Southern Hungary (Cultural Capital of Europe, 2010) which was occupied by the Ottoman Turks after the defeat of the Hungarians at Mohács in 1526 and inhabited by them for over a century, so it is hardly surprising that several of the papers make up a distinct group about balladic Turks of one degree of reality or another, but a study about the Slovenian appropriation of a Hungarian ‘hero’ is also indicative of the spread of the papers.

Andrew C. Rouse

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