The Social Genesis of the Hungarian Literary Field: Symbolic Revolution and the Fall of Aristocratic Authority

ABSTRACT At the center of this study is a key event in the formation of the modern Hungarian literary field: the series of debates known as the Lexicon Trial (1830–1831), which played a decisive role in the institutionalization and autonomization of literature during Hungary's Reform Era (1825–1848). Over these years, the literary sphere gradually began to organize itself around “pure” esthetic judgments—a transformation that can be conceptualized as a “symbolic revolution” in Bourdieu's sense. This historical–sociological analysis focuses on strategies of the “social capitalization of knowledge,” drawing on Viktor Karády's concept to trace how pre‐intellectual groups migrating to Pest‐Buda laid the foundations for the main literary professions. I interpret the polemic surrounding the publication of the lexicon as a clash between the progressive‐autonomous and conservative factions of literary figures, with the aim of capturing, in sociological terms, how a demarcated market of symbolic goods was established in Hungary. I aim to demonstrate the utility of a Bourdieusian historical–sociological framework for examining the genealogy of semi‐peripheral fields of cultural production, particularly those marked by belated embourgeoisement, thereby offering an alternative to positivist literary history. This work also serves as an invitation to apply Bourdieusian historical analysis in one of its domains par excellence: the autonomization of fields.