Geografia romanului românesc (1901-1932): străinătatea

This study revisits what is widely considered “the first modern novel” in Romanian literature, Liviu Rebreanu’s Ion, from a network theory perspective. Isolating the dialogue and quantitatively analysing the interventions of every character and their interactions in the fictional world, it provides a blueprint for the exploration of social and personal dynamics between characters. In recent years, rural literature in Romania has undergone a recontextualization process. Following in the footsteps of these approaches, our research provides the first character network of Ion and outlines who talks, how much, and to whom. It also explores how differences in social class influence speaking time or the structure of the individual discourses, taking an in-depth look at the relationship between and roles of the two characters who talk most.

The Character Network in Liviu Rebreanu’s Ion: A Quantitative Analysis of Dialogue

2020

Translations of Novels in the Romanian Culture During the Long Nineteenth Century (1794-1914): A Quantitative Perspective

Baghiu

2020

This article uses quantitative methods to provide a macro perspective on translations of novels in Romanian culture during the long nineteenth century, by modifying Eric Hobsbawm’s 1789-1914 period, and using it as spanning from 1794 (the first registered local publishing of a translated novel) to 1918 (the end of the First World War). The article discusses the predominance of the French novel (almost 70% of the total of translated novels), the case of four other main competitors in the second line of translations (or the golden circle, as named in the article: German, English, Russian, and Italian), the strange case of the American novel as a transition zone, and the situation of five other groups of novels translated during the period (the atomizing agents: the East European, the Spanish, the Austrian, the Nordic, and the Asian novel).

The Sickle and the Piano. A Distant Reading of Work in the Nineteenth Century Romanian Novel

Baghiu

Borza

2020

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.