Reading the Plains and the Lake: Landscape in Hungarian Travel Literature

Travel writing has enjoyed continuous success since the Renaissance, and has been an important factor in shaping perceptions of individual and group identities. Especially during the second half of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century travelogues constituted an influential part of the discourse on culture, and helped, through their descriptions of the foreign and a reaffirmation of what is “us”, establish the ideology of nationalism. Works by British authors such as William Wordsworth and the travel writings of Hungarian poet Sándor Petõfi and politician, essayist, and novelist József Eötvös offer examples of different strategies of using landscape as means of affirming contours of national identity.