Florian Freitag, The Farm Novel in North America: Genre and Nation in the United States, English Canada, and French Canada, 1845–1945

The peasant and the nation plot: a distant reading of the Romanian rural novel from the first half of the twentieth century

“…The selection of the sample (namely, what makes a novel rural) was guided by the most inclusive conceptual delimitations. Building on the influential theoretical studies that focus on defining the rural novel (Vernois, 1966;Williams, 1973;Cavallero, 1977;Parkinson, 1984;Freitag, 2013), we adhere to the prevailing interpretation that this subgenre is characterised by: protagonists who are closely connected to the rural environment (peasants, shepherds, anglers, primary school teachers, priests); a preponderantly rural setting (hence, we except the rustic novels, whose plots develop exclusively in spatial enclaves such as manor houses that have little to do with the peasant life); themes that are intimately linked to the peasants' existence (poverty, hard work, exploitation, the relationship between the individual and the traditional community, migration of work force, etc. ).…”