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In the poem Vaporul morței and in its French version Le Vaisseau fantome, Alexandru Macedonski reworks a literary myth specific not only to Fantastic and Gothic literature (both romantic and symbolist/ decadent), but also to maritime adventure literature, which had a vast spread through several artistic forms, especially in the 19th century. In this contribution, by analyzing and discussing the mythical constellation of the ghost ship, I will outline that, in Macedonski's poetry, Vaporul morței emerges as the most striking metaphor of the liminal existential condition of a poet always torn between Spleen and Ideal. From a collective myth, belonging to the category of the terrifying, the ghost ship becomes a haunting personal myth and an in-between and heterotopic space. Materializing a psychic and archetypal palimpsest, Vaporul morței reveals all the painful splits deeply sedimented in Macedonski's abysmal Self and all the antitheses that run through his poetic imaginary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzing some of Alexandru Macedonski's poems, written both in Romanian and in French, this study aims to outline the construction of macedonskian masculinity as a reflection of the decadent theatricalization of identity, demonstrating that his vitalistic and dominant hyper-virility is closely linked to the obsession with self-representation which in its narcissic ambiguity allows us to glimpse eccentric and non-normative aspects of a multiple masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Gothic-Postmodernism in Dora Pavel's fiction. In the first theoretical part, it will be presented the symbiotic convergence and the genetical affinity between Gothic and Postmodernism. In the second part, it will be shown that the works of the Romanian writer, through hybridizations and grafts, incorporates Gothic features sometimes explicitly, sometimes unconsciously and in a more encrypted way. A summary analysis of the first two novels - Dying Agata (Agata murind, 2003) and The Captive (Captivul, 2006) - will be proposed, through which some Gothic traces will be reviewed. A more extended case study will be dedicated to the novel Powder (Pudră, 2010). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses the contents within the issue, including articles on topics such as Neo-Gothic art and literature, the works of poet Edgar Allan Poe, and Gothic-Absurd hybrid.

In her essay Mihai Eminescu o dell'assoluto Rosa del Conte, reflecting on the chromatic sensibility of Mihai Eminescu, remarked that in modern literature only Charles Baudelaire could be placed next to the Romanian poet for his almost morbid passion for all glittering materials: metals, crystals, precious stones. In this contribution we propose to begin a systematic study of the Eminescian mineral imaginary by focusing our attention, this time, only on the "crystalline reveries". By analyzing the symbolic valorizations of the crystal, considered in all the hypostases disseminated in the Eminescian texts (diamond, emerald, ruby, sapphire, pearl), we will show that for Eminescu the crystal does not represent only the image of a world in the world containing individual destiny, but also a "space-light" which, in its inorganic fixity and imperishable stability, materializes an "oneiric space-time" of eternity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Le temps viendra où tous sera or et amour. Car toute transmutation est possible, là où ne sont que les cases d'un seul air...", wrote Paul Păun in Les esprits animaux (1947). The two lengthy poems published in Romania, Plămânul sălbatec (1939) and Marea Palidă (1945), represents a high witness for this possibility of transmutation. They are secretly magnetized by "the manifested beauty of the dream", but also by the alchemic decantation of the images and their metamorphic aspects. This paper is a fragment of a more extended research about Paul Păun's poetical works15, still little known in Romania and abroad, and it is focused on the first poem Plămânul sălbatec, published in book in 1939. Even though in Plămânul sălbatec Păun did not apply deliberately and consciously surrealist strategies, the fragmentary delirium of this poem seems to be founded, in part, on automatism and on hasard objectif. His images are intended to transfigure reality, revealing, at the same time, these qualities of the unconscious that the poet defined as "cryptesthésiques". The images become then a means to understand a complex reality, revealing also the desire of renewing the world through the power of dreams. Plămânul sălbatec, always suspended between the elementary poetry of the "immediate life" and the vertigo of the encrypted and abysmal "word", represents a good illustration of "total poetry", where action and dream, the ideological level and the poetological one overlap simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay about Domnişoara Christina (1936) by Mircea Eliade focuses, at first on the folkloric motifs in the novel, which intersect the implicit and explicit intertextualities coming from fantastic and gothic Western Europe literature. The second part of this study is dedicated to the construction of the image of "devouring femininity" and of its metamorphosis, and to the vampirophania, i.e. the gradual revelation and manifestation of a both terrifying and fantastic "reality". The last part proposes a transversal reading of the novel trying to demonstrate that Christina is the projection of the anima, the female intra-psychic archetype of the main male character Egor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]