Genre hybridity, self-discovery and trauma: Andrea Tompa’s The Hangman’s House

Year, pages: 2023, 83 - 95

Andrea Tompa’s novel A hóhér háza (2010; Eng. trans. The Hangman’s House, 2021) gives insight into a teenage girl’s coming of age during the last decades of the Ceauşescu regime. Recounting the story of three generations of a Transylvanian intelligentsia family, from the 1940s until the fall of the dictatorship in 1989, the novel depicts all the crucial moments of 20th-century Transylvanian history. At its crux stands a journey of self-discovery, which gains meaning in the context of the family history. This duality is reflected in the hybridity of the novel’s genre. Tompa’s work is of a hybrid genre that, in addition to the dominant presence of the autobiographical novel, encompasses elements of the Bildungsroman and the family novel. Self-discovery and family history are joined together in the protagonist’s character, as the traumatic experiences of the family past become crucial parts of the protagonist’s self-knowledge and personality through postmemory.

Balogh, M. 2023. Genre hybridity, self-discovery and trauma: Andrea Tompa’s The Hangman’s House. In World Literature Studies, vol. 15, no.4, pp. 83-95. 1337-9275. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31577/WLS.2023.15.4.6

Balogh, M. (2023). Genre hybridity, self-discovery and trauma: Andrea Tompa’s The Hangman’s House. World Literature Studies, 15(4), 83-95. 1337-9275. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31577/WLS.2023.15.4.6

Publisher: Ústav svetovej literatúry SAV, v. v. i.