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.
The present study dwells on an archive that includes around 85% of the Romanian production of novel from 1845 to 1947 and analyzes the social aspects of daily life in the fictional worlds of realist novels published in this timespan. From work conditions to the rights of employees, from hunger to bountifulness, from modesty to display, two different hemispheres seem to co-exist: a rustical and narrow one of the rural, liminal spaces, and a cosmopolitan and broad one of cities and mobility. Without a doubt, besides this spatial influence over daily life, an even more important one, that sometimes is complementary to the first and sometimes it overarches it is social class. In the mirrored image of the realist Romanian novel until 1947, there is nothing more consequential for individual and collective characters than class, and the differences between classes are closely linked to all dimensions of daily life described in our article.
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