The image of the Danube in three French travelogues of the 19th century

Abstract

The paper focuses on the literary research of the French travel literature of the 19th century, while its basic aim is to interpret the image of the Danube in three specific travel books. Because of the polysemantic nature of the concept of image, we will focus on one methodological approache that we apply in interpretation. We will view the image through the prism of poetics, which is interested in the structure and aesthetic function of the image. The interpreted images of the Danube represent higher thematic overlaps of otherwise poetically distinct travel writings published in different decades of the century in question. Among these images we include, in particular, the depiction of the Danube through its scenic navigation, but also the image of the grandeur of this river, and we also include here the only partially sketched image of the Danube as a weaker offshoot of the Rhine or as a mirror of history.