Denby, A.; (2005) The English and classical substance of Babits' novels. Doctoral thesis , University of London.

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Abstract

This thesis investigates Mihaly Babits's increasingly original utilisation of English and classical literature in his five novels. It also interprets the relevance of its findings. Intertextuality originating in English works is traceable in Babits's first novel, A golyakalifa (1916) and in his second novel, Kartyavar (1915-1923). Babits's A golyakalifa has roots in Virgil's Eclogues , Coleridge's and Wordsworth's verse. It imitates Edgar Allan Poe's, Robert Louis Stevenson's and Oscar Wilde's doppelganger fiction. The sources of intertextuality in Kartyavar are Virgil's Aeneid and Charles Dickens's Hard Times and Bleak House. Carlyle's, Macaulay's and J. S. Mill's ideas form a basis of Kartyavar's philosophy. Babits drew on Dickens in the way he created his characters in Kartyavar . Babits's third novel, Timar Virgil fia (1919-1922) incorporates certain themes of Shakespeare's plays as well. It is a hypertext of The Aeneid, and transposes themes and moods from Keats's, Wordsworth's and Tennyson's verse. It has many intertexts such as quotations from Virgil and St. Augustine. Babits's fourth novel, Halalfiai (1927) and his last novel, Elza pilota (1918-1933) are more original hypertexts of their exemplars. Halalfiai has roots in George Eliot's and George Meredith's novels. It has intertextual episodes which are adaptations of Meredith's The Egoist. Halalfiai is also an architectural hypertext of particular works by Fielding, Smollett, and Goldsmith. Elza pilota (1933) reads as a metatext of some of its sources, such as Thomas More's Utopia and Bacon's New Atlantis , but is principally an ingenious hypertext of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Poe's as well as H. G. Wells's works. It creates its own innovative narrative and story.

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