The present study proposes an experimental exploration of the Romanian novel written between 1920 and 1940 through the use of stylometry, a method of distant reading employed for the statistical analysis of style. Drawing from the most recent advances in the field of computational stylistics, we select a formal standpoint from which we seek to investigate the relation between the Romanian novelistic canon and minor, tertiary novels published in the same. In our test cases, we will attempt to establish some of the more promising aspects of stylometric analysis, as well as single out the experiments that yield no relevant result. Because of the relative novelty of the method, the purpose of our investigations is to offer a kind of pilot experiment that can illustrate the benefits of using computational methods on Romanian literary corpora.

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.

The following paper intends to investigate the main junctures and disjunctures of Romanian prose written by women in the first half of the twentieth century from a quantitative perspective. The paper will employ a macroanalysis of both the novels written in this period and the prose written by female writers, in order to establish a pattern in the modernisation and institutionalisation of Romanian literature in the inter-war period, more specifically in the 1930s, the decade that saw the emergence of the main canonical Romanian novels. The paper will also delve into the main principles and discussions surrounding early Romanian feminism. Aspects such as import literature, translations, and the circulation of Western literary trends in the Romanian cultural field will be critical to understand how Romanian prose written by women evolved over the course of the twentieth century and established an alternative literary canon.

Following a two-pronged line of argumentation, our article seeks to analyze and evaluate the current state of quantitative approaches applied to Romanian literature within the context and framework of one of the most prominent emergent fields of literary studies: quantitative formalism. Thus, on the one hand, the paper will attempt to present the most well-known lexicographic instruments currently used in quantitative studies in Romania (The Chronological Dictionary of the Romanian Novel from its Origins to 1989, The Chronological Dictionary of Translated Novels in Romania from its Origins to 1989, and The Bibliography of the Relations between Romanian Literature and Foreign Literatures in Periodicals 1919–1944), and, on the other, to employ the emerging methods that make use of these instruments, alongside their inherent limitations and the pragmatic issues that concern them) as a starting point for a debate on the current state of theoretical and critical approaches to the study of literature in the Romanian academic field. A selective and detailed application of the quantitative methodologies in question, as they are theorized by scholars such as Franco Moretti (“distant reading”) or Matthew L. Jockers (“macroanalysis”) will be another focal point of our paper, as it will seek to further illustrate the manner in which a meta-reflection on the approach itself can encourage the further development of quantitative methods in the study of Romanian literature.

My paper aims to present how the Romanian romance novel written between late 19th century and the Second World War fictionalized some of the gender codes active in that particular timeframe in social and familial contexts. A very popular subgenre amid the unprofessional readers, romance fiction rises a new kind of responsibility for literary critics and historians, that traditionally gave little to no attention to the matter of toxic gender codes found in these novels. This article attempts to analyse, by means of both close and distant reading tools, a few narrative aspects that encoded gender inequality.

My paper aims to investigate an early phase of the globalization phenomenon as it has manifested in a specific peripheral space, attempting to map, by means of both close and distant reading, how the internalization processes have been mirrored in the modern Romanian novel. The scope of my research revolves around the responses that Romanian literature – a peripheral, minor literature – has had towards transnational or global models, and how the novelistic production of the aforementioned timeframe has metabolised and illustrated the foreign input in our culture. The theoretical framework of the present