Search

In the history of literature, the best-selling phenomenon is relatively new, it appeared with the modernization of printing, the cheapening of paper, the development of the middle class and the expansion of the reader market in the nineteenth century. In his book, Frédéric Rouvillois concludes that a bestseller is rather a socio-economic phenomenon: it tells us what interests a society at a given time, draws our attention to marketing campaigns orchestrated by publishers and to networks and conjunctures. The bestseller has been influenced, over time, by the advent of cinema and television, and by the existence of the internet. Although there are charts with the most read books and recipes on how to write a bestseller, publishers have not yet been able to answer the question of what determines the success of a book. There is, as Rouvillois believed, a certain mystery surrounding the appearance of a bestseller, and this is because literary success escapes rational explanation, it is technically unrepeatable and unpredictable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present research we have analyzed the place that Transylvania magazine had in between the Romanian magazines, starting from the appreciations of the researchers that had studied varied aspects concerning de Association's periodical. We have not left out the papers of those who have dealt with the analysis of the Romanian press' history. Nevertheless, we have relied on our own research made during the doctoral programme, where we studied the evolution of Transylvania magazine between 1868-1919, a time frame that we have included in our present study. Another problem that we have wanted to highlight is the one linked to the editorial aspect of the magazine. And in this analysis we started from the information supplied by the specific historiography, which we classified according to our own results. Our approach did not stop over every editor between 1868-1919, as a matter of fact we did not even want to do this, to emphasize the general characteristic of the magazine and not the one that stood out in a certain period of time is our goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the case of French-Romanian translations from the Humanities field, published in Romania after 1989, and advocates the need of genuine translation policies, as both cultural and editorial strategies. Whereas during the 1990s, translations, especially those of reflexive books, were on the forefront of the pending book market, towards the 2000s, Romanian editors' enthusiasm for French Humanities seemed to have disappeared. It was the end of the translations' frenzy wave that coincided with the physical disappearance of great upholders of the so called "post-structuralist" thinking, better known under the Anglo-American label of "French Theory". (Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and, in different ways, Bourdieu, Baudrillard, Virilio etc.). The change of an era (which, paradoxically, represents a globalization devoid of "global" key figures), entails a change in the way of acting, in the requirement for the multiplicity and continuity of contracts, in actions and aids, in micro-policies, in other words a change in the cross-cutting fittings of different entities, dimensions, scales and definitions. Since this is a turning point for small publishing houses (both French and Romanian), one should call, together with other relevant actors such as publishing companies and translators, for institutional and procedural imagination in order to reinvent and relaunch a potential model of critical culture, so much needed during the "crisis-globality" that characterizes the present era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

H.H. Stahl has repeatedly spoken about the informal, joint editing of the journal „Sociologie românească." S. Golopenţia points to the facts that (a) from the beginning and until its last issue, the journal was published under the care of a number of editors, comprised of O. Neamţu and T. Herseni in 1936, A. Golopenţia in 1937-1942 (helped by F. Florescu, D. Dogaru, S. Popescu, and with a major interruption caused by the war), and G. Focşa in 1943; (b) A. Golopenţia's editorial activity is richly documented: he drafted an ambitious Program, wrote numerous editorial letters and spoke of his editorial work in personal letters sent to many members of the Gusti School; (c) the examination of the journal reveals progressive contents and format innovations that could not have been obtained via improvisation; (d) even before more material is discovered with respect to the work of the 1936 and 1943 editors, we can still answer in the negative the question above. "Sociologie românească" was professionally edited, by a number of sociologists, whose names and editorial responsibilities were explicitly mentioned and well known among the members of the Gusti School. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with a largely forgotten editorial project from 1990, when the eminent scholar and editor Petru Creţia submitted to the readers three plays by M. Eminescu: Decebal, Bogdan Dragoş, Alexandru Lăpuşneanu. Although published fragmentarily in several previous editions, they had never been presented as almost complete and able to resist a thorough aesthetic evaluation. The plays appeared in new versions, with numerous emendations and completions to the already published fragments, but their importance is greater if one takes into account the radical editorial conception that they for the first time put into practice, before its ellaboration in the book Testament of an Eminescu Scholar (1998). The paper discusses his conception, as it emerges from practice, with a special emphasis on the editorial role that it generates. We shall also make an analysis of the volume, and especially of the play Decebal, assessing not so much the intrinsic value of the play, but its functioning in the complex reading relationship that it establishes with the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]