A Missed Opportunity? Transylvania as a Virtual Central Europe

The article focuses on the analysis of the ideas of Aladár Kuncz, a writer, literary critic and editor who defined Transylvanian Hungarian literature after 1918 in a European context. The concept of Transylvanism is discussed through the debates of the interwar period, and is situated within the context of Hungarian literary modernism. In the light of the Transylvanian literary ideas of the 1920s and 1930s, minority / regional literatures would have been directly related to a new concept of European and world literature beyond national literatures, along a line of thought that acknowledged the deterministic character of regionalism, and prioritized it also at the level of cultural memory, considering it to be primary over linguistic, national, and the changing geographical boundaries. These endeavours sought to revive an emphatic idea of Central Europe with its strict ideals of quality besides strong local, decentralized, yet transnational aspirations, while making them compatible with the preservation of linguistic and cultural ties with the three traditional Transylvanian nations. The article also discusses the reasons why, in the midst of the 1930s, facing political restrictions, the literary form of Transylvanism became outdated in the eye of the younger generations of the Hungarian community.