Edit Király

Bio

Edit Király has been teaching at the Department German Literature and Culture at ELTE Budapest since 1991. Her main research interests include semantics of space, travelogues and river narratives. She is the author of Die Donau ist die Form. Strom-Diskurse in Texten und Bildern des 19. Jahrhunderts. (Böhlau 2017), (in Hungarian 2021). Recently she co-edited Der montierte Fluss. Donaunarrative in Text, Film und Fotografie (Steiner Verlag 2023). She has published essays on Péter Esterházy, Heimito von Doderer, Gert Jonke, Wolf Haas, Andreas Okopenko and on Lost Places etc.

Research project

My project deals with the politics of nature. It focuses on the Hungarian environmental movement of the 1980s and its gradual politicization in the last decade of the socialist regime. I would like to map the relationship between different groups of the Hungarian democratic opposition and the Danube Circle and to find out the specific political character of the latter. A further question of my research is how the topoi of Austrian and Hungarian environmentalists differed and whether their differences can be explained by the different political systems involved.