National Images in the Media and in Travel Writing

Abstract The image that Romania has abroad represents, especially from a journalistic perspective, a more and more fashionable topic, although the westerners’ interest in this ‘different’ country is not that recent. What is recent is the self-awareness that Romanians are starting to develop, with regard to the westerners’ opinions, appreciative or deprecatory as they may be. The media play a very important role in the dissemination of national images and are the main provider of clichés and stereotypes. Ethnic groups are stereotyped and ‘otherized’ on the basis of popular media images. However, travel accounts are the literary works that carry imagological messages par excellence. My intention is to illustrate how the media influence the dissemination of images in travel writing and how images in travel writing can be approached through instruments normally used in journalistic discourse analysis