Vol. 5 No. 2 (2025)
Research Article

Human and Nonhuman Animals in Sándor Márai’s Peace in Ithaca

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  • Attila Simon
Attila Simon
Department of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Múzeum krt. 4/A, 1088 Budapest, Hungary
DOI: https://doi.org/10.47075/CEC.2025-2.02

Published 2025-12-22

Keywords

  • Literary Animal Studies,
  • zoopoetics,
  • human‒animal relations,
  • Márai,
  • Agamben

How to Cite

Simon, Attila. 2025. “Human and Nonhuman Animals in Sándor Márai’s Peace in Ithaca”. Central European Cultures 5 (2):28-42. https://doi.org/10.47075/CEC.2025-2.02.

Copyright (c) 2025 Author(s)

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Abstract

 This paper on Sándor Márai’s 1952 novel Béke Ithakában [Peace in Ithaca] centres on the political zoology of the Third Book . It shows that in this case Márai questions the nature of man and the difference between man and animal more sharply than in his earlier works—not independently of his experiences of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century and WW II. In the novel, the ancient bucolic tradition is the vehicle for these issues, which also correspond to contemporary developments in European thought. 

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