CONQUERING THE CITY Novi Sad in the Hungarian poetry of Vojvodina

Abstract

The city of Novi Sad has an outstanding role in the Hungarian poetry of Vojvodina. It denotes a location, a framework of people’s lives, yet at the same time it functions as a cultural space, a scene of literary creation and of literary identification. The conquering of the city, which at the beginning only showed its alienness, was a special challenge for a Hungarian writer in Vojvodina. Following the history of Hungarian literature in Vojvodina, the paper follows the stages of oscillation between rejection and acceptance, the process in which the multicultural environment changes from alien to own, and then alien again for a writer with a minority identity. Above all it studies works of poetry whose spatial reading is also changes of the sense of belonging. In the meantime, historical remembrance comes to life, and the imprint of the present events are also strongly outlined in the texts.