Abstract
Minority literatures are politicized entities organized along rather complex strategies of self-interpretation. Minority literature is always a relational concept: it tries to interpret itself in relation to the literature of the majority or the universal, while also trying to take into account specific, individual qualities. This study attempts to draw the lines of the strategies of self-interpretation and face-shaping in Hungarian literature in (Czecho)Slovakia from 1918 to the present. It traces the historical and poetic changes in the various interpretative frameworks and also attempts to pay attention to the relationship between Hungarian literature in Slovakia and Hungarian literature in Romania (Transylvania), since what has been called Transylvanism has long been the model of Hungarian literature in (Czecho)Slovakia, too. Various ideological constraints led to the development of increasingly specific concepts, such as minority messianism or the ideology of communist universalism. Self-fashioning is a term of new historicism, but the theoretical framework will also be extended to transcultural literary interpretation. The relationship to identities is also a fundamental issue in minority studies, and their performativity and malleability become especially interesting. It is very important to distinguish between the poetic and political aspects of these phenomena. Today, the poetics of transculturalism makes some of the products of minority literature exceptionally exciting, in which linguistic hybridity, transitions, vernacular linguistic experience or minority esthetics may play a major role. Social homogenization and insularity have been replaced by strategies of poetic dynamism. The study also looks at trends in polycultural integration.