Tradition and Transformation: The Changing Genre of the Short Story in Contemporary Hungarian Literature

Abstract As a dynamic literary form, the short story offers literary scholarship a unique opportunity to explore the complex tension between tradition and innovation. The interplay between historical continuity and poetic variability becomes particularly evident in the genre of the short story cycle, which integrates the poetic logic of both the classical short story and the novel. This study examines how the short story cycle emerges as a literary form of fragmentation, intertextuality, and narrative openness through the analysis of two contemporary Hungarian short story collections: László Csabai’s Szindbád, a detektív [Szindbád, the Detective] and Ádám Bodor’s Verhovina madarai [The Birds of Verhovina]. The investigation focuses on the adaptive potential and cultural mediating function of the short story genre, with special attention to the world-building models, cyclic composition strategies, and meaning-generating structures of contemporary texts.