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It goes without saying that during the nineteenth and twentieth century literary historiography tries to define national identities. However, a methodological and paradigm shift occur at the beginning of the twenty-first century when, under the auspices of globalization and the emergence of world literature and transnational literary studies, literary historiography is rethought as a collective and transnational project. Yet, the asymmetry of the world literary system affects literary historiography too. When it comes to this scholarly genre, the asymmetry is most visible in the fact that in the era of transnationalism, national histories are still written at the periphery. Given the aforementioned observation, this paper a) looks into the challenges of writing literary history in Romania in the age of world literature and transnational studies, and b) tries to explain why a national literary history is still needed and how it can change the way we think about Romanian literature. The starting point of this inquiry is represented by the publication of Mihai Iovănel’s Istoria literaturii române contemporane: 1990-2020 [History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020]. In the context of the ‘transnational turn’ in literary studies, the attempt to write relevant national histories in a peripheral literary space such as Romania is faced, in my view, with two major challenges: 1) the fact that transnationalism manifests itself differently at the periphery and 2) the tradition of Romanian literary criticism and history. The former refers to the fact that unlike central literatures, where transnationalism is shaped to a large extent by migrant writers (those who enter these literatures), in Romanian literature it comprises exiled or migrant writers (those who left Romania and not vice versa) and, to a lesser extent, the literatures written by ethnic minorities. A comparative approach can cast light on this difference. For example, while the thirteenth volume of The Oxford English Literary History is dedicated entirely to migrant and bicultural writers, transnational histories concerning the peripheries, such as History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, focus on multiple literary spaces and therefore have a different approach to dealing with transnationalism. The latter challenge is represented, as shown by Iovănel, by the long-lasting tradition of the “principle of aesthetic autonomism”, which persists even in post-communist Romania. In this regard, this paper aims to show that Iovănel’s History… overcomes the above-mentioned hindrances of literary criticism and succeeds in offering an image of Romanian literature not as confined to its national boundaries but as part of the world literary system. Along with other significant scholarly works on Romanian literature as and in world literature, this project is a significant step towards re-thinking Romanian literature as a “literature of the world” (Terian 2015). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employed in the study of national or transnational literatures, the relevance of digital humanities, computational analyses, and quantitative sociology can no longer be ignored. In this paper, we aim to argue that, in spite of it still being seen as a niche endeavor, the digital or quantitative study of literature generates paradigmatic shifts in literary scholarship, both in literary criticism and comparative studies. In order to demonstrate this statement, the following study will illustrate how three core principles of digital humanities are actively shaping humanities as we know it. These principles – openness, replicability, and collaboration – challenge the way we understand the role of the literary historian and their „traditional” tasks. To consolidate this argumentation further, we will briefly present an example of how digital humanities start changing the dominant narrative in Romania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary history is still the most successful strategy of systematizing knowledge in Romanian academe and, although the theoretical revolution that took place in literary studies between 1960-1990 did not leave it unscathed, it remains the methodological anchor of every attempt at trying to make sense of the entirety of a specific culture. In this paper I analyze Mihai Iovănel’s new History of Contemporary Romanian Literature and whether it succeeds in revolutionizing (methodologically or in terms of cultural analysis) an old and robust genre of explanation, in an intellectual culture that is otherwise enamored with dictionaries, encyclopedias and all-encompassing narratives of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Premised on the pervasiveness of generic categories within literary historiography, the present analysis attempts to delineate the generic idioms present within three histories of Romanian literature (authored by G. Călinescu, Nicolae Manolescu and Mihai Iovănel, respectively). Engaging a descriptively historical, rather than theoretical, approach to genre and its metadiscourses, the paper begins with an abridged version of the cardinal disputes of genre criticism. Subsequently, it comparatively addresses the presence of genre within the three volumes, aiming to locate them within recognizable frameworks of genericity and to establish the overlapping territories of their generic landscapes. Thus, it distinguishes G. Călinescu as a practitioner of post-Romantic genre theory, further showcasing how some of his central aestheticist positions survive in Nicolae Manolescu’s moderately formalist account of the issue. Against the backdrop of their more conservative, teleological historiographical projects, Mihai Iovănel’s 2021 Istoria Literaturii Române Contemporane 1990-2020 [The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature 1990-2020] displays a distinct methodological apparatus, predicated on the author’s rejection of the paradigmatic autonomy of the aesthetic. His employment of materialist theories of art is corelative to a conception of genre as a contingent, empirically determined instrument of analysis, which, far from being a rhetorically stable, abstract category, actively mediates the relationship between social and aesthetic history. This shift engenders substantial amendments to the physiognomy of literary history as genre, enabling it to encompass extra-literary (and noncanonical) phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to explore the situation and prospects of literary geography in the Romanian culture, especially its recent manifestations with reference to Western academia. Therefore many projects of transnational literary historiography emerged in the early XXI century are based on a geographic component, reflected by concepts such as "topographic nodes" (Marcel Cornis-Pope), "archipelago" (Hervé Thery) "(pen)insular" (César Dominguez) by recourse to atlases (Franco Moretti) or even GIS maps. In these circumstances, the question arises to what extent the literary geography works published in Romania (like Geography of Romanian Literature, today signed by Cornel Ungureanu) managed to synchronize with the western direction, represented by the research mentioned above. The originality of this paper lies in questioning Cornel Ungureanu volumes in relation to the similar synthesis from West and also in self-reflection on the ways in which ethnicity, historical evolution and cultural patterns determine the profile of a literature and culture of a predefined geographic area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elementa linguae daco romanae sive valachicae (1780) and the fur ther grammar books. The paper aims to reveal a comparison between two grammar books from the eighteenth century (Elementa linguae daco romanae sive valachicae written by Samuil Micu and Gh. Sincai and Romanian Grammar (1797) of Radu Tempea). The analysis is based on some aspects concerning the importance of the two papers for that epoch, their structures, the terminology used and even examples that are common for both of them. It has started from the fact that Romanian Grammar of Tempea and other similar speciality papers have been influenced by Elementa. Thus, the comparison has in view the significance of these ancient grammar books for the Romanian development in literary history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]