Guest lectures 27.5. by SELMA visiting scholars

SELMA Visiting Lecture Series
27 May 2025, 10-12

Guide through Life: Social Normativity in 19th Century Hungarian Female Conduct Books

by Judit Kerpics, Assistant Professor, University of Szeged (HU), Juhász Gyula Faculty of Education, Department of Cultural Studies

Keywords: conduct books; women’s roles; 19th century literature; Hungarian literature; normative literature; domestic literature

“The genre of female conduct book flourished in the 19th century Anglo-Saxon world, and soon it conquered the book markets of Central Europe. It was an essential part of middle-class girls’ and women’s education: it became readily available, required almost no assistance and provided the means for self-regulation, since public schools for girls in most European countries were organised quite late in comparison to boys schools. Conduct books were more than just mediators of social rules, they often created them. As such, they had a strong influence on domestic life and litearture too. Authors used them both as a source and a justification when depicting family life and social standards The lecture will focus on one of the first Hungarian women’s conduct book, the Guide through Life (Júlia Jósika, Pályavezető, 1863) with it’s Anglo-Saxon examples, newspaper origins, approved female role-repertoire and it’s changes decades later in a new edition. 19th century conduct books are part of the history of female social norms and behaviour: they reflect or sometimes initiate changes, their values are an inherent part of fictional literature written for female audience.”

Between Silence and Speech: Cultural Metaphors of Anxiety in Indian Narratives

Dr. Arya Priyadarshini is an Assistant Professor of English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, India. Her research lies at the intersection of sociolinguistics, trauma studies, and mental health discourse. She holds a PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology Mandi, where she examined trauma narratives in contemporary children’s and young adult literature from West Asia. Her current research, “Linguistic Landscapes of Anxiety,” funded by NIT Rourkela seed grant, investigates how anxiety is metaphorically expressed in Indian personal narratives, with a focus on building culturally sensitive mental health vocabularies.

“This talk explores how anxiety is expressed through metaphor in Indian personal narratives, drawing on sociolinguistics, trauma studies, and cultural psychiatry. In multilingual and socially diverse settings, where mental health is often stigmatized, metaphors offer individuals a culturally resonant way to articulate psychological distress. Analyzing narratives in English and Hindi, this study identifies recurring metaphorical frames that shape how anxiety is experienced and communicated. These metaphors are not merely linguistic tools but cognitive-emotional structures that reflect cultural understandings of suffering and resilience. The talk also addresses the limitations of universalized biomedical frameworks in capturing localized emotional realities. By mapping these metaphors, the project aims to foster more inclusive, empathetic approaches to mental health discourse and build a culturally grounded vocabulary for emotional wellbeing in India.”