18th-century critical writing in Hungary evolved in the framework of historia literaria, a discipline adopted from German Protestant universities. Encyclopedic compendia written in this framework, starting with Dávid Czvittinger’s 1711 Specimen Hungariae Literatae, covered authors who within the geographical boundaries of the Kingdom of Hungary, regardless of ethnicity or language, contributed to its literature. No distinction was made between imaginative and learned literature. The compilers of these lexicons were usually not ethnic Magyars and this scope of “the literature of Hungary” represented their own hungarus identity. Written mostly in Latin (the first of its kind in Hungarian, Péter Bod’s Magyar Athenas appeared in 1766), these compendiums were widely used in higher education, and many of them remained in circulation well into the 19th century. Their main ideological function was vindication: against the Völkertafel tradition which had characterized the Hungarians in terms of martial valour rather than culture or learning, historia literaria demonstrated that Humanist erudition had had outstanding achievements in the Kingdom of Hungary. Initially an all-encompassing archive of biographical and bibliographical data, historia litteraria gradually incorporated historical perspectives and narrowed the focus as to include works written in Hungarian (or in the other vernaculars of the Kingdom) towards the end of the century. The Conspectus Reipublicae Litterariae in Hungaria (1785, 1808) by the Slovakian-Hungarian Lutheran minister Paullus/Pál/Pavel Wallaszky/Valaszky (1742-1824) followed a chronological order and established historical periods; Sámuel Pápay’s (1770–1828) A magyar Literatúra esmérete (“Knowledge of Hungarian Literature”, 1808) coined the term “national literature” (Nemzeti Literatúra) to denote the “education of the nation in her own mother tongue”. Pápay restricted his scope to Magyar-language works and devoted two-thirds of his compendium to the study of the “Origins and Natural Characteristics of the Magyar language”.

From the early 19th century the territorial framework (literatures in Hungary) was increasingly supplanted by that of a Hungarian literature as a historical entity describable in narrative form. These narratives were informed by different notions of temporality. Ferenc Kazinczy’s German-language essay for the 1808 Tübingen Competition used the “histories of Hungarian literature” as a repository of exempla to underpin his main claim, namely that the Magyar language had become refined enough to conduct public administration (which at the time was conducted in Latin). Later narrative histories not only began to distinguish between erudition and aesthetic creativity but also presented a collective singular Geschichte (instead of multiple “histories”) in which historical development was perceived as stemming from an inherent substance and the teleological goals that it had predetermined.

Comprehensive narratives of the “national literature” first appeared during the 1850-60s in the literary histories by Ferenc Toldy (1805-1875). Born as Franz Schedel in Buda, Toldy learned Hungarian at a young age and magyarized his name in the 1840s – a move that manifested how the older hungarus tradition was turning into an ethnic sense of Hungarian identity; the literary history as a genre maintained, however, its tendecy towards vindicating the nation’s character. The young Schedel had already given a historical survey in the introduction to his 1828 Handbuch, a collection of German translations of Hungarian verse. In his later works, to some extent drawing on Gervinus and on August Koberstein, Toldy unfolded a teleological narrative in which national literature was destined to move towards a state where it would “mirror the nation’s sentiments by its own particular poetic forms”. In his magnum opus A magyar nemzeti irodalom története (“A History of Hungarian national literature”, 1864-65) Toldy narrated the story of Magyar literature in his own first-peron-plural voice, thereby signalling his own symbolic inclusion into the genealogy of the Conquerors. This rhetorical elision of his own (non-Magyar) origin also affected his view on the growth of Hungarian culture: the historical development of Hungary’s national literature involved the Magyars adopting the universal aesthetic taste of European high culture, which in turn, enable the artistic expression of national themes in the vernacular. In this aesthetic universalism Toldy followed the Neoclassicist principles of the early 19th century Hungarian and the 18th-century anthropological aesthetics of György/Georg Alajos/Aloy Szerdahely (1740-1808) and Lajos/Ludwig Schedius (1768-1847), professors of aesthetics at the University of Pest.

This negotation of the aesthetically universal and the nationally particular set Toldy’s perspective apart from those who began to see Western high culture as foreign to national literary traditions. Against Toldy’s conception (which made Petőfi appear as a “primitive” folk poet lacking erudition), the likes of Ferenc Kölcsey and János Erdélyi stressed that art must be rooted in inherent national features. Whereas for Toldy nationhood remained genealogical (at least rhetorically), for his contemporaries it was the continuity of cultural traditions (maintained in and by the vernacular) that constituted genuine nationality.

Even so, this critical vein of Romantic Nationalism did not wholly abandon Classical taste. The essays Kölcsey wrote for the critical periodical Élet és Literatúra which he co-edited between 1826 and 1833 had already staged this controversy. His Herderian “Nemzeti hagyományok” (“National traditions”, 1826) stressed that Magyar-language poetry should consolidate cultural memories. However sceptical Kölcsey remained about the prospects of uncovering genuine “national traditions” (which he saw as largely undone by the Magyars’ 11th-century conversion to Christianity), his surmise that they might have been conserved in folk poetry proved seminal for mid-century Hungarian criticism.

Classicist taste was also present in the national-artistic criticism of János Erdélyi, the leading Hungarian theoretician of folk poetry. His 1847 essay “Egyéni és eszményi” (“Individual and Ideal”) drew a sharp distinction between literatures reflecting their age, place and community and those expressing abstract beauty. For Erdélyi this dichotomy coincided with the one between domestic/native forms of art and foreign one (i.e. European high culture); those who followed the latter he deemed “servile”. While his distinction between “individual” and “ideal” was loosely based on the Romantic-Classical opposition, Erdélyi remained hostile to what he saw as artificial exaggerations in German and French Romanticism. And even if he claimed that “artistic space is open to the infinite” (i.e. anything can be a valid object for art), he harshly dismissed what he saw as “coarse” and “vulgar” in folk poetry. It also was Erdélyi who, as a logical counterpart to his conception of national literature, introduced the notion of Weltliteratur into Hungarian criticism. In his review on the poet Mihály Vörösmarty he claimed that the world canon would only be reached by nationally typical works.

The reconciliation of Classicist aesthetics with national character preoccupied Hungarian criticism deep into the century. During the 1860-70s Pál Gyulai tried to square the circle in his concept of National Classicism. Equally hostile to Romanticism and to Realism/Naturalism, Gyulai maintained that literary works ought to comply with the peculiar features of their respective national cultures as well as keep the “eternal rules” of creative art. In Gyulai’s view the genre that fitted Hungarian mentality best was epic poetry (especially balladry) as represented by the work of János Arany.

Arany himself, echoing Jacob Grimm’s idea (Gedanken: wie sich die Sagen zur Poesie und Geschichte verhalten; 1808) that collective memory was preserved by oral poetry, was preoccupied with national epic both as a poet and a critic. He addressed the lack of genuine Hungarian sagas in his 1857-60 essay “Naiv eposzunk” (“Our naïve epic”). In this Arany claimed that the sporadic mentions of Magyar troubadours in Medieval historiography suggested the existence of a Hungarian oral epic, which, not retained by written culture, was lost and forgotten by the 16th century. With this oral tradition sinking into oblivion, he added, the ground had been lost on which “the gallery of national poetry could be erected”. Arany intended his own historical verse epics to cempensate for this lacuna. Also preoccupied with the critical dilemmas of a national aesthetic, Arany contributed to prosody with an essay on the idiosyncratic metrical structures of Hungarian poetry (1856). His inaugural lecture at the Academy in 1859 on the correspondences between Tasso and the 17th-century Hungarian-Croatian poet Miklós Zrinyi was an early masterpiece of comparative studies.

In the 1850s the novelist Zsigmond Kemény wrote essays sociologically scrutinizing the prospects of a national literature on a literary market increasingly informed by commodification. Late-19th-century Hungarian Positivism, however, continued to rely on the post-Romantic framework of national character: ethnotypes were invoked as an explanatory national temperament which in fact reflected the stasis and quietism of the post-1849 political climat, with attributes such as a quetly “rural” passivity cherishing undisturbed continuity with the past. It was from this angle that Frigyes Riedl’s 1887 monograph on Arany presented the poet as the perfect embodiment of the “attributes of the Hungarian race”.

Attempting to present Hungarian literature as self-contained while also acknowledging European influences, Zsolt Beöthy’s A magyar irodalom kis-tükre (“A small speculum of Hungarian literature”, 1896) highlighted the openness and the authenticity of the Hungarian natational character. In this representative literary history written for the Millennial Celebrations, Beöthy highlighted ethnotypical attributes such as calm confidence and national attachment in an evocation of a 9th-century horsemen from the Magyar tribes on the Volga steppes, a figure he borrowed from the imagery of Hungarian Romantic epic poetry; even so, his approach was far from racial. For Beöthy national characteristics could be acquired through assimilation; that is why he was able to present the ethnically non-Magyar Petőfi (along with Arany) as culminations in the operation of the national spirit. Beöthy’s work also continued the tradition of national vindication which had been so persistent in Hungarian literary histories. Along with justifying Magyar hegemony in a multi-ethnic country, his aim was to prove that Hungarian literature deserved the esteem of European nations (hence the numerous translations of his work).

At the hands of Beöthy and others, fin-de-siècle Hungarian critical writing increasingly became a form of national self-celebration, with literary history serving as a repository of national virtues. At the same time, path-breaking work in comparativism was also taking place. Dismissing both nationally biased and cosmopolitan approaches, Hugo Meltzl (1846–1908) and his periodical Acta Comparationis (1877-1888), published in Meltzl’s native Kolozsvár/Cluj, proposed a multicultural and multilingual framework for literary studies, favoring the local/regional to the universal. Rehabilitating literatures written in a dialect and embracing “literatures without a nation”, Meltzl also provided publicity for the poetry of the Roma.