A geographer's tale: Nation, modernity, and the negotiation of self in 'Trianon' Hungary, 1900--1960.

摘要

Drawing on the private papers and scholarly publications of the Hungarian geographer Ferenc Fodor (1887-1962), this dissertation examines conservative-nationalist identity formation in Hungary between 1900 and 1960, a period which was marked, amongst other things, by the signing of the territorially devastating Treaty of Trianon after World War I, by Hungary's defeat in World War II, and by the postwar consolidation of communism. Looking in particular at how Fodor attempted to negotiate a stable sense of self against the backdrop of a conservative vision of the nation, the dissertation argues that, though Fodor was able to construct a relatively comfortable, middle-class life for himself and his family as a nationalist intellectual, he was unable to overcome the sense of fragmentation, dissolution, and alienation which had burdened him since his youth. Reading his letters, notebooks, diaries, and collections of photographs against his published and unpublished work, the dissertation argues that his on-going quest for meaning and wholeness was undermined not so much by a series of traumatic events, but rather by the nature of both nation and self as unstable "fictions."