Las mujeres lectoras en Hungría del siglo XVIII y XIX

The research on which the study is based examines book and press publishing in old Hungary in the 18th and 19th centuries from the point of view of what works were written for the growing number of female readers, and what they should and should not read. By the end of the 18th century, the “reading fever” had reached the literate members of Hungarian society, and women’s needs were met by writers and translators who wrote or translated epistolary novels, women’s biographies, romantic stories and newspaper articles of interest to women, based on the works of Campe, Beaumont, Gellert and others. In the first half of the 19th century, during the Hungarian reform era, reading in Hungarian and the cultivation of the national language were considered particularly important. In the second half of the 19th century, thanks to the public education law of 1868, which made school attendance compulsory for both boys and girls in Hungary, the question of what girls and women should read became an increasingly important issue. There were a large number of newspaper articles and book chapters on the subject, and the authors (many of whom were already women) in most cases focused on moral education and nation building when choosing what to read. The section of reading history presented here on the development of the Hungarian female reading public can also be an important starting point for extending comparisons in a broader, international context, from the point of view of the history of culture, literature and education.