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Ferenc Bíró's book is structured by the internal logic of the unique "dialogue" between successive generations of the nobility and the literati . In the 1770s, writers who were nobles replaced the clergymen-writers of the previous decades, and after only ten years of dominance, the nobles were replaced by the secularized literati, who arrived on the Hungarian cultural and literary scene in the 1780s.
"While the structural basis of the model developed in the book is determined by this temporally-defined sociological background, the order of the chapters cannot be based entirely on this chronological approach. The chapters The Breakthrough of the Enlightenment, which covers the 1770s, and Between the Baroque and the Enlightenment, which covers the period leading up to it, cannot simply be followed by a discussion of the last two decades of the eighteenth century. The larger sections on the ideas and genres which dominated the period require that the whole, roughly fifty-year-era be covered." (pp. 21-22). These thematic sub-sections, especially those subsumed under the title Ideas, are among the book's great merits. Summaries such as those on linguistics, philosophy, and the historical school provide an opportunity for observing and describing changes which are of fundamental importance for understanding the period as a whole and which also demonstrate various aspects of secularization as the central force in the Enlightenment.
Within the survey of genres, the lengthy chapter on poetry includes portraits of writers which continue where the portraits in the first two sections on generations leave off. Bíró's approach is to focus on important elements of the work of a particular writer or poet in order to grasp the character and importance of his oeuvre. The long account of Mihály Vitéz Csokonai's oeuvre is the most important.
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