Authors

Discussion

My proposal addresses the multilingual literary culture in Pest–Buda around 1800. The city that became known as Budapest and the capital of Hungary in the 19^th century, had a vibrant and rarely acknowledged multiethnic cultural life around 1800, supported by the rich merchant communities of Serbs and Greeks, and by the solid German speaking bourgeoisie.  My presentation will focus on the theatrical culture  of the twin cities, and through  the examination of the repertoire of the Hungarian and German theatres respectively, will argue that the theatre  offered the opportunity to the multilingual audience to experience traditional and contemporary European drama in a comparative light, while it also contributed  to the rise of Serbian theatre.  The paper will also attempt to understand the influence of local multilingualism on the rise of individual native language literary cultures.