This article puts forward a quantitative account of the subgenres of the Romanian novel during the 1933-1947 period. It shows the massive domination of the social novel and the Bildungsroman and analyzes the dynamics of genre and popular literature – adventure novels, detective fiction, SF, etc. – within the first period of massive literary production in Romanian literature. The article is the result of the MDRR (Muzeul Digital al Romanului Românesc – The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel) projects, set out to archive the Romanian production of novels from 1845 (the year of the publication of the – arguably – first Romanian novel) to 1947, right before the establishment of the communist regime. The first part is a quantitative analysis of the novels according to DCRR (Dicționarul cronologic al romanului românesc – The Chronological Dictionary of the Romanian Novel). The second part analyzes the “dynamics of popular subgenres,” meaning adventure novels, policiers, SF novels, and children’s literature. The third part envisions “the social novel” as a predilect genre of the interwar period, the fourth occasions a reading of the “historical novel,” while the last two sections describe the evolution of sentimental and psychological novels.
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.
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 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.
This study explores, using intersectionality and quantitative analysis, several axes that help shape the identity of the characters in the fictional worlds from a corpus of approximately 500 Romanian novels published between 1844 and 1932. They are gender, ethnicity/nationality, and class/work. It also briefly analyzes the gender gap in the production of the novel and examines the dynamics between the gender of the authors and the gender of the main character(s) and the person of the narration, by using metadata compiled by our research team and complex searches in the digital corpus.
This paper focuses on the strategies enacted by Mihai Iovănelʼs History in order to map the transnational interactions of contemporary Romanian literature. Since Iovănel emphasizes that, starting with the 2000s, the Romanian writers define themselves mainly through the global networks in which they try to integrate, this article aims to analyse: a) the canonical function acquired by the local references to World Literature; b) their explanatory role compared to the one played by the closed circuit of the so-called “intra-national” comparisons; c) the theoretical legitimacy of the “transnational canon” projected by Iovănel in the epilogue of his History.
This article conducts a semantic search of The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel: The 19th Century (MDRR), through which the authors attempt to identify the occurrences of several key concepts for class and labour imagery in the nineteenth-century Romanian novel, such as “muncă” [labour/work], “muncitor” [labourer/worker], “țăran” [peasant], “funcționar” [civil servant], alongside two main words that strikingly point out to a dissemblance of representation of work: “seceră” [sickle] and “pian” [piano]. The authors show that physical work is underrepresented in the Romanian novel between 1844 and 1900, and that novelists prefer to participate to the rise of the novel through representing the bourgeois intimate space.
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