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The article sets out to establish the ways in which the Romanian novelistic production between 1845 and 1947 reflects the challenges and accomplishments of successive efforts at modernising the educational system. Therefore, the case-studies we discuss are focused on some of the major implications of Romanian education: the shifts in the literal spaces in which the educational process is being conducted, the access to books and the social prestige accrued through reading, the link between education and the abroad – including the ambivalent status of foreign language education as platform on which the conflict between nationalism and cosmopolitanism is played out –, the opportunities opened by scientific progress, but also the anxieties it generates.

This article analyzes the ways in which the Romanian novel published between 1933-1947 represents foreign cities, towns, peripheries, and villages in the fictional worlds. It asserts the democratization of the narrative universe through the planetary perspective of the novels and discusses the birth of the Global South imagery. The search was conducted on a corpus of 700 novels in the MDRR archive. The data is disposed through quantifying recurrences (the number of novels in which a city appears) and occurrences (the number of times a city appears) of foreign cities. This article deals with representations of Europe and the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australia in the 1933-1947 Romanian novel. It separates three main categories (main cities, consolidation cities, and secondary cities) and shows the planetary distribution of space within the Romanian novel.

This article aims to investigate the depiction of living space(s) and architecture in the Romanian novel between 1844 and 1947. It has a descriptive dimension, discussing the construction of fictional worlds through a series of key-issues: a fascination with urban spaces (with the centralization/ provincialization of urban imagery), the function allowed to women vs. men in various social spheres (certain rooms, certain public fora), the disintegration of urban families, precarious living on the fringes of urban society etc. The authors map the occurrence of such new phenomena or spatial mutations, commenting on their historical context and scope (through statistical analysis). At the same time, there is a more reflexive, theoretical side to our research. Drawing on the work of theorists like Bertrand Westphal, Henri Lefebvre, Nirmal Puwar, and Habermas (to name but a few), this article asks many vital questions pertaining to geocriticism and sociocriticism alike: what is the difference between a place and fictional space; how can we define the public and the private sphere in the Romanian novel through issues like political participation and representation, exclusion, agency, and the right to leisure; how exactly do social norms and relationships contribute to the construction and the organisation of novelistic space?

The present article addresses Mihai Iovănel’s recently published History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 while pursuing a series of similarities with other contributions to postcommunist national literatures in the Central and Eastern European cultural space, on the one hand, and with previous ways of understanding the concept of literary history, on the other. The article argues that Iovănel’s History is one of the first to assess the importance of the social in the production, study, and national, as well as transnational dissemination of Romanian literature, an emphasis without which the study of literary phenomena risks falling into the blindness of aesthetic autonomy, whose shortcomings are well documented in the book. Lastly, I will argue that Iovănel unwillingly describes several of the most notable shifts in the “regimes of relevance” (Galin Tihanov) that literature has undergone from the communist period to contemporary times.

Combining the instruments of quantitative analysis with those of genre theory, the present article studies the ratio, characteristics, and tendencies underpinning the most important subgenres of the Romanian novel between 1901 and 1932. Among these subgenres, we lay special emphasis on those of popular fiction, on the social, historical, sentimental, psychological, and philosophical novel, as well as on the so-called “event novel”. The conclusions of our inquiry illustrate the ever-growing divide between artistic literature and popular fiction, the recasting of the Romanian novelistic subgenres during the early 20th century, and the gradual relocation of the novelists’ focus from the unmediated depiction of events towards the world and the individual self.

The Geography of the Romanian Novel (1901-1932): Spaces from Abroad This article charts the main cities mentioned in the Romanian novel published between 1901 and 1932 based on the corpus of novels created by the research project The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel 1901-1932 (around 370 digitized novels). The main discoveries that our distant reading of the geography in these novels revealed are that the planet is covered in the Romanian novel during the period in genre fiction (that has mentions of cities from Africa, Asia and South America), not in modernist highbrow literature, and that the dominance of Paris and Rome as spaces where the action takes place is atomized during this period by smaller cities in France and Italy. The article also describes the relation between social mobility and geographical coverage in the epoch. Keywords: Romanian literature, distant reading, geocriticism, literary geography, planetarity.

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’.