Social Realities in the Making [antikvár]

FOREWORD It gives me great pleasure to introduce this volume as the eleventh in the series entided Papers in English and American Studies (PEAS) published by our Institute of English and American Studies. The Institute prides itself on being the first ever in Hungary to have launched an American Studies program. Under the leadership of Dr. Bálint Rozsnyai, the program was founded inl985 and matured into a major degree program by 1994. It has exhibited great development in terms of the number of staff, infrastructure, student body, teaching potential as well as research output of which this volume is the first representative in the PEAS series. As Shelley Fisher Fishkin, current president of the American Studies Association, claimed in her presidential address in Atianta in November 2004, American Studies has been open to a wide range of methodologies and approaches, and connected to this is the assumption that its definition may well vary from place to place and even from scholar to scholar. Reassuring as this view may look at first sight, she also pointed at the existence of major tendencies that have influenced the development of the field in one way or another ever since the 1960s, with the emergence of women's and the civil rights movement, various sorts of minority consciousness, and, in our times, transnationalism {AmericanQuarterly lAzxch 2005,19). In otlier words, history seems to have molded the contours of American Studies world wide, to a great extent offering concerns and emphases, raising certain issues for scholarly attention. Thus, however much these may vary, no institution of American Studies can have the power to remain unaffected by these processes. Consequently, the American Studies program has as its major components the more rccendy developed fields of cultural studies, ethnic and minority studies, women's studies or popular culture alongside the more traditional fields having a longer record such as history, intellectual history, literary history or the history of American religions. Both research and teaching have focuses in these fields. This work by Irén Annus addresses the issue of identity, a theme that has been a major concern in American Studies since its founding in the 1950s and a problem that cuts across quite a number of the sub-fields of American Studies. Identity is