Search

Drawing from recent developments in the field of World Literature, but also earlier attempts at mapping local cultural traditions, contexts, and affinities, our proposal attempts to investigate the dominant patterns of cultural criticism within the literary publications active during the interwar period. Using an exhaustive resource of metadata related to the relations between Romanian literature and foreign literatures developed over the span of twenty years, we plot a network abstraction focused on revealing patterns and trends of reception within Romanian cultural magazines. This process of “topic modeling” cultural criticism will serve to illustrate the dominant subject matters present in the Romanian cultural press. Following our data analysis, we will attempt to provide an explanatory model of “theory production” in Romanian literary culture that accounts for the seemingly “ahistorical” nature of autochthonous localizations.

The paper looks at the Romanian relationship between modernism and rural imagination in the Romanian 20th century debates. As in other cases of semi-peripheral or emergent literatures (the general framework builds on contributions from Frederic Jameson, Pascale Casanova and Wai Chee Dimock), the hegemonical pressure of the Eurochronology has put an embargo on rural prose, excluding it from the projects of modernist literature. The study asserts that far from being a collateral symptom of modernity, rural imaginary is essential for understanding its contradictory mechanisms.

The present article follows the relationship of the Romanian novelistic output between 1901 and 1932 with time and temporal distribution. Its emphasis falls on the degree of correlation between the time of publication and the time during which the events unfold for each corresponding novel, expressed through a variable coined “distance”. By making use of this variable, the temporal distribution of the novelistic corpus in the article clearly shows that the novelists’ focus gradually shifts towards contemporary events; while during the period between 1900 up until the outbreak of World War One, novelists were inclined to place the events of their works in the past, the War seems to have triggered an acute preoccupation with the immediate present. Lastly, the text touches upon two distinct subgenres of the novel, arisen out of their relationship to time, namely the historical novel and the so-called ‘contemporary novel’.

The following study employs a quantitative analysis of the Romanian novelistic production from the period 1901-1932. By using the literary corpus developed by the research project ASTRA Data Mining. The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel 1901-1932, implemented by ASTRA National Museum Complex, this paper focuses on the secondary canonical writers (with their “b-sides and rarities”), the novelists’ origins, the abundance and the geographical nodes of production, in order to investigate the dynamic relation between national cultural centers and their respective editorial networks, as well as the mechanisms of canonization within the Romanian novel of the period.