Literary Journal 2018/3. Sorcery

Our issue tracks the depictions of witches, from children’s and youth literature to the most popular and lesser-known stories of world and Hungarian literature to contemporary texts. In addition to educational studies, essays, and art analyzes, the publication provides a selection of lyrical texts and prose from different centuries, offering not only literary historical curiosities to the Reader, but also an exclusive collection of various witch-like characters and figure transformations, like fairy, beautiful woman, the so-called lidérc, witch or hag.

The richly illustrated issue looks in the direction of music and visual culture; it publishes four interviews inviting the Reader to reflect on witchcraft from the aspect of women’s history, the magical quality of poetry, the relationship between medicine and superstitious beliefs, the social tensions centered around the witch’s figure, and the spiritual responsibility of the writer’s role. Writings that broaden the horizons of the subject toward ethnography, religious history, linguistics, and psychology contribute to complementing the witch motif of the cultural tradition. In addition to stepmothers, enchanters and sorcerers in the realm of fiction, the publication also draws attention to real, ordinary people whose sacrifices still form a deeply contemplative historical focus in the diversity of the creative imagination that this issue hopes to achieve. The Literary Journal commemorates them with excerpts from the lawsuits.