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In this paper, I have reviewed some of the most interesting ideas and arguments concerning what has been called the ‘post-truth condition’. I set out to find answers to two questions. First, I have tried to understand whether we are dealing with a new phenomenon, specific for the contemporary world, or, on the contrary, we are facing an older human tendency, which manifests itself today in a new and more aggressive form. Secondly, I have tried to provide an answer to the question of whether or not post-truth is a phenomenon necessary connected to human nature itself, that is, whether man is, as some scholars have claimed, a ‘post-truth species’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing partially on Ovid S. Crohmălniceanu’s suggestion that the interwar Romanian novel depicts mental illness, this paper aims to analyze the representations of such psychological ailments in Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu’s A Concert of Music by Bach. However, the thesis that I put forward is that the novel is more than a mere inventory of disabled characters, as this difference is charged with ideological meaning, which is revealed when the reader takes into account the metaphors of disability that abound in the novel. In several cases, the character’s difference is doubled by a theriomorphic figure, associating thus mental illness with monstrosity, animality, savagery, and angelism. As a result, the aforementioned characters are represented as alterity, as humas that have lost their human characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The second half of the twentieth century has offered a number of great novels that came to be described as maximalist, due to their objectives and realization. As a result, more and more critical attention has been focused on the ways in which these works circulate and influence the mediums to which they are translated. The present paper synthesizes the concept of maximalist novel and tries to analyse the elements that constitute its theoretical specificity. Moreover, the article explores the existence or the absence of some of the canonical text that represent this genre in Romanian, trying to give an account of the relation between the Romanian literary space and the maximalist paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on Elizabeth Gaskell's revision of the female Gothic, where Evil does no longer belong to the supernatural realm but comes into being from erroneous and unbalanced behaviour. Our intention is to reveal Gaskell's accuracy and acumen in achieving the picture of the destructive power of mass hysteria as rejection of Otherness, of its implications and consequences in a way that was several decades later theorized by the social psychologist Gustave Le Bon in The Crowd: A study of the Popular Mind (1896). Gaskell's own analysis of mass hysterical behaviour points at the three categories subsequently detailed by Le Bon: suggestibility, contagion, and anonymity. Making use of a highly symbolical composition and of various forms of excess (visual, lexical, or formal), Gaskell's Gothic shorter fiction proved to be the perfect means for her to express repressed concerns an obsessions that she could not fully develop in her social novels. The novella Lois the Witch (1859) works therefore as a metaphorical but powerful intervention into the social, political and religious discourse of the 19th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A problem which our literary history has usually ignored was the influence of the English and American Culture on the Romanian interwar Young Generation, especially on the writers from the Criterion group. Inspired by the American debates. and mainly on some novelistic patterns inspired by the Anglo-Saxon sources. Some of the young essayists of the 30s were also particularly interested in the American or English literature and cultural mentality. In fact, it was the first time when Romanian modern culture really met that pattern, which was to became global after a few decades. Which were the consequences of those cultural influences - that is the question which this paper tries to answer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper Fiction Art vs. Religious fiction between freedom and censorship describes the appearance of freedom thought on matters such religion in contemporary society. Writer's continuous dialogue with the myth led to substantial changes in content. If Greco- Roman religions have free-barrier ban interpretation of myths in author's mind, monotheistic religions such as Christianity, Islam etc., trying to combat all forms of freedom of thought in relation to the sacred texts. As seen Feuerbach artistic imagination products do not claim to be taken as objective reality; they do not require the reader's belief in the identity of real-image. As result you have that the confrontation between religious and aesthetic is illogical and artistic fiction gaining credibility in a situation where the recipient treats it as a non-fictional text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents Greimas' actantial pattern applied to Ion Creangă's fairy tale and tries to give a clear image of the hero's evolution, according to some peculiar aspect of this pattern, such as the modalities of the action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is focused on some of J. L. Borges' short stories as starting points for historiographical metafiction. The article also analyses the influence of Borges' work on novels written by Salman Rushdie as well as Borges' influence on Romanian postmodernism and upon authors like Ştefan Agopian and Mircea Cărtărescu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]