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In the present article, I address two novelistic productions set in late 19th century and early 20th century Transylvania, discussing the different intersections of class, ethnicity, and culture underlying the constructed image of Empire in the periphery. Drawing on Manuela Boatcă and Anca Pârvulescu’s work on Transylvanian inter-imperiality – borrowed, in turn, from Laura Doyle –, the paper discusses Ioan Slavici’s Mara and Liviu Rebreanu’s Forest of the Hanged as stages of imperial downfall. The main argument is that, whereas Mara and other similar works present the interclass and interethnic conflict as negotiable compromise functioning as narrative momentum for the novelistic plot, the compromise comes undone in Forest of the Hanged, where the capitalist aspirations of the former work is put aside in the forging of national identity.

The present article addresses the Romanian novelistic production between 1901 and 1932 in the attempt of identifying a series of patterns regarding the protagonists’ social mobility. Starting with the most mentioned destinations throughout the novels, I analyse how and why the different social classes travel and try to determine the landmarks between which they dispute their physical presence, on the one hand, and their aspirations, on the other. On this basis, the second part of the article conducts a quantitative analysis of the major means of transport in the period – the train, the tramway, the coach/carriage, the automobile, the aeroplane, the ship, and the waggon – and attempts to pinpoint what they convey about the social mobility of the characters that use them.

This paper attempts to undertake a geo-literary analysis of contemporary Scandinavian literature, departing from the pastoral nature representations of 19th century literary awakening and lingering on recent Scandinavian crime fiction, as this subgenre represents the Scandinavian peninsula’s latest contribution to World Literature and a “temporary sub-centre” (Mads Rosendahl Thomsen) of provisional international interest. Transcending both the idyllical natural setting of romanticism and the estrangement of modernism, Scandinavian literature succeeds in re-establishing the rural as predilect locus of narrative unfolding. The paper argues that the rural mise-en-scene is symptomatic for a broader ideological background, as it best reflects the ecological ethos that cuts across the peninsula’s history, from the nationalistic discourse of nature to the criticism directed against the dismantling of social-democracy under the pressure of neoliberalism.

This paper focuses on the current evolution of Norwegian literature, namely on the branch of Norwegian literary activity that falls within the theoretical frame of ‘immigrationist literature’ (innvandrerlitteratur). The paper is to be seen as a pledge against the implementation of cultural studies in the field of literary theory when dealing with such works that, through their number, are unrepresentative for a wider literary context. The argumentation relies on the fact that the phenomenon of innvandrerlittertur cannot be fully addressed from a cultural studies perspective, which often tends to produce reductionist claims and thus lead to ready-made conclusions that fail to reveal the inner workings of the literary phenomenon it aims to present. Moreover, such an approach tends to divert the interpreter’s attention from the actual literary works and funnel all interest in the direction of politics and extra-literary contexts.

This paper aims to shed light on the different aspects of transnationalism and transnational literature in regard to the German cultural space and the so-called (Im)Migrantenliteratur (immigrant literature and migrant literature, respectively). By this approach, the historical context of post-war Germany will prove itself to be of great relevance, especially in studying the sociological consequences brought about by the import of Turkish work force in Germany, the concept of difference and its modes of realisation, and the prevalence of cultural specific characteristics in works belonging to Turkish-born German authors (f.e. Feridun Zaimoğlu). Last, but not least, our study will include a series of considerations regarding translation and the problems and debates resulting from the effort of transferring the symbolic signs of one culture into another.