‘But not for him. Just by him’: Hungarian landscapes and women’s time in the short fiction of Anna T. Szabó and Krisztina Tóth

Contemporary Hungarian women writers use the short form as a feminist intervention in current gender politics. Creating space in which to explore alternatives to patriarchal cultures and illiberal political movements, they deploy physical and imaginary landscapes to critique the past and present of embodied feminine experience. Our comparison of two short stories, ‘Moon and Palm’ (2016) by Anna T. Szabó (1972–present) and ‘Black Snowman’ (2006) by Krisztina Tóth (1967–present) intersects their complex temporalities with traditions of folklore and tale-telling to show how they turn a ‘feminine form’ into a feminist practice.