Stories of Repatriation – The Transformation of Hungarian Travel Writing in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

(Draft for a Genre and Media History Research

Abstract

The paper is a historical-theoretical chapter of my dissertation on Hungarian literary representations of the Lake Balaton in the nineteenth-twentieth century. The first part of the study summarizes the dominant concepts and forms of periodisation in connection with the history of modern Hungarian travel writing, occasionally challenging some of their assumptions. The next section emphasizes the importance of the less researched era between the mid-nineteenth century and the 1920s, addressing the development of modern mass tourism and the (medial, poetic) diversification of travel writing genres. In the second part of the paper, I examine the Hungarian literary representations of tourism, and the tourist existence in the middle of the nineteenth century through Mór Jókai’s travel writings, highlighting the role of the weekly Vasárnapi Ujság [Sunday Newspaper].