This book offers an assessment of the Hungarian and the Romanian academically based elites of Transylvania in times of spectacular political change coupled with relative social stagnation. During the first half of the 20th century, the Transylvanian higher educational market was governed not only by conflicting local needs, but also by extraterritorial factors. Ethnic competition in and through academe was complemented by antagonistic extraterritorial centers of political and ethno-cultural gravitation. The alleged integrative role of the Cluj/Kolozsvr University proved to be exerted, not so much along socio-economic lines, but instead along ethno-political ones reflected in radical changes of the guard in the university's clientele. Higher learning was thus less an agent of modernization than an instrument for survival in the continuous strife for national dominance. The fate of the university during these years shows how this struggle for domination could be constructed as a substit

Situated on the geographic margins of two nations, yet imagined as central to each, Transylvania has long been a site of nationalist struggles. Since the fall of communism, these struggles have been particularly intense in Cluj, Transylvania's cultural and political center. Yet heated nationalist rhetoric has evoked only muted popular response. The citizens of Cluj--the Romanian-speaking majority and the Hungarian-speaking minority--have been largely indifferent to the nationalist claims made in their names. Based on seven years of field research, this book examines not only the sharply polarized fields of nationalist politics--in Cluj, Transylvania, and the wider region--but also the more fluid terrain on which ethnicity and nationhood are experienced, enacted, and understood in everyday life. In doing so the book addresses fundamental questions about ethnicity: where it is, when it matters, and how it works. Bridging conventional divisions of academic labor, Rogers Brubaker and his collaborators employ perspectives seldom found together: historical and ethnographic, institutional and interactional, political and experiential. Further developing the argument of Brubaker's groundbreaking Ethnicity without Groups, the book demonstrates that it is ultimately in and through everyday experience--as much as in political contestation or cultural articulation--that ethnicity and nationhood are produced and reproduced as basic categories of social and political life.

Exploring Transylvania by Török reconstructs the fissured scholarly landscape in one of the most culturally heterogeneous regions of the Habsburg Monarchy. The author creates an original model of the structure and historical dynamics of an East-Central European province in the republic of letters by tracing the activities of learned societies engaged in the exploration of their fatherland and their connections to national academic centers outside Transylvania. Analyzing the entangled history of the local German, Hungarian, and Romanian scholarly cultures, the book demonstrates how a persisting politics of difference, practiced by various political regimes over the long nineteenth century, solidified national hierarchies and exacerbated endemic tensions both in the Transylvanian intellectual milieus and in scholarship itself.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Introduction to Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies -- Part One: History, Theory, and Methodology for Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies -- The Study of Hungarian Culture as Comparative Central European Cultural Studies -- Literacy, Culture, and History in the Work of Thienemann and Hajnal -- Vámbéry, Victorian Culture, and Stoker's Dracula -- Memory and Modernity in Fodor's Geographical Work on Hungary -- The Fragmented (Cultural) Body in Polcz's Asszony a fronton (A Woman on the Front) -- Part Two: Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies of Literature and Culture -- Contemporary Hungarian Literary Criticism and the Memory of the Socialist Past -- The Absurd as a Form of Realism in Hungarian Literature -- On the German and English Versions of Márai's A gyertyák csonkig égnek (Die Glut and Embers) -- Exile, Homeland, and Milieu in the Oral Lore of Carpatho-Rusyn Jews -- Part Three: Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies and the Other Arts -- Nation, Gender, and Race in the Ragtime Culture of Millennial Budapest -- Jewish (Over)tones in Viennese and Budapest Operetta -- Curtiz, Hungarian Cinema, and Hollywood -- Lost Dreams and Sacred Visions in the Art of Ámos -- Art Nouveau and Hungarian Cultural Nationalism -- Part Four: Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies and Gender Studies -- Hungarian Political Posters, Clinton, and the (Im)possibility of Political Drag -- The Cold War, Fashion, and Resistance in 1950s Hungary -- Sándor/Sarolta Vay, a Gender Bender in Fin-de-Siècle Hungary -- Women Managers Communicating Gender in Hungary -- Part Five: Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies of Contemporary Hungary -- Commemoration and Contestation of the 1956 Revolution in Hungary -- About the Jewish Renaissance in Post-1989 Hungary -- Aspects of Contemporary Hungarian Literature and Cinema.

Chartered in 1780, Transylvania University played a significant role as an educational pioneer in the developing trans-Allegheny West and served as its first institution of higher education. Strategically located in the growing city of Lexington, Kentucky, the university established schools of law and medicine at a time when there were few such educational offerings in the country. Noted alumni include emancipationist Cassius M. Clay and Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Two centuries later, Transylvania University maintains its commitment to the highest standards of the liberal arts education. Now passing its 225th anniversary, it remains an educational beacon for Kentucky and the South.

Explores how Transylvania figures in the Hungarian imagination and how this border region functions in the creation of national identity.