This article analyzes the ways in which the Romanian novel published between 1933-1947 represents cities, towns, peripheries and villages in the fictional worlds. It asserts the democratization of the narrative universe through the novel of the periphery and discusses the birth of the touristic novel, in which characters often spend time in new areas for relaxation. It also challenges the idea of spatial atomization, since the geographical preferences of the authors are usually centralized and gentrified. Almost only subgenre novels and ethnical minority authors are responsible for the democratization of the national geography of the Romanian novel in 1933-1947.
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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