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• Discourses around the Great Hungarian Plain in Early 19th-Century Travelogues

  1-25

  Imre Nagy

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  Through examining Hungarian travel literature from the first half of the 19th century, the present
  paper aims to explore the representations of the Great Hungarian Plain and the discursive transformations
  surrounding it. Its premise is that travelogues are not merely descriptive sources, but
  texts produced at the intersection of contemporary spatial perception, aesthetic norms, and the
  formation of national identity, that transform the landscape into a culturally mediated experience.
  The paper's central thesis is that the image of the Great Hungarian Plain underwent a significant
  discursive transformation from the beginning of the century to the end of the Reform Era: the
  plain, initially characterized by negative aesthetic terms (emptiness, monotony, formlessness),
  gradually became one of the privileged spatial embodiments of national identity.
  The study concludes that travelogues from the early 19th century depict the Great Plain not simply
  as a geographical space, but as a complex mental and cultural construct. These texts contribute to
  the formation of a national conception of space in which the Great Plain appears both as a periphery
  and as a centre, a paradoxical territory of freedom and exposure, familiarity and alienation.