A Hitel fikciós példázatai. Két elbeszélés az 1830-as évekből
Fictional Parables of István Széchenyi’s Hitel. Two Stories from the 1830s

Summary/Abstract: The paper looks at two Hungarian short stories, one by Pál Csató and one by Mihály Táncsics, from the 1830s. In each, the plot centers on credit relations and both stories feature a Jewish creditor. Alongside their evidently didactic intentions, they are also interconnected by a set of social and economic issues that they both tackle, such as the mutuality between financial rationality, efficient economic management and moral renewal, the reform of economic infrastructure and education, the opposition of landed wealth and capital, of past and present, the relationship between identity and property, and the prospects for social justice and national integration in a market society. The paper argues that literary texts of this kind (didactic economic fictions) may be fruitfully discussed within the history of political economy as a discourse as far as they contributed to the social formation of economic knowledge. It is in this sense that these novellas may be approached as literary commentaries on István Széchenyi’s economic and political reform program: while mediating it in a popular narrative form, they also problematized its viability.

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