Book Description

Ethnic Mobility in Ballads is the fourth volume in the new SPECHEL e-ditions series. It comprises studies about ballads that in different ways reflect the movement of ethnic groups, transcending and defying national borders in ways that range from the borrowing of ‘national’ heroes to popular interpretations (and distortions) of ethnicities not one’s own, to the transfer of humour from one ethnicity to another. The studies are the result of the 44th International Ballad Conference of the Kommission für Volksdichtung, held in 2014 in Pécs, a city in Southern Hungary (Cultural Capital of Europe, 2010) which was occupied by the Ottoman Turks after the defeat of the Hungarians at Mohács in 1526 and inhabited by them for over a century, so it is hardly surprising that several of the papers make up a distinct group about balladic Turks of one degree of reality or another, but a study about the Slovenian appropriation of a Hungarian ‘hero’ is also indicative of the spread of the papers.