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The paper focuses on the ideological shift after 1989 that determined the nature of the debates over the role of Ana, the female character of the Legend of Master Manole, and her sacrifice. Until 1989, her perspective was widely ignored because the canonical interpretation of the ballad emphasized the male perspective of Manole and his sacrifice for the act of creation. After 1989, the feminist discourse argued that the symbolic structures perpetuated by this myth were reinforced in Romania by the communist regime. The main aim of the article is thus to present how the newly formed feminist critique employed one of the canonical Romanian texts to show the functioning of the model of a self-sacrificing woman in the social imaginary. * This research is funded by the National Science Centre in Poland under the project: The Topos of an “Immured Woman” in the Cultures of Southeastern Europe and Hungary, no. 2020/37/B/HS2/00152.

The main objective of my paper is to present the sociopolitical circumstances of the creation of the rock-symphonic opera Meșterul Manole (2013), based on a libretto by Victor Cârcu and composed by Joseph Kappl (former member of the rock band Phoenix), its reception by contemporary society and its character as an intermedial work. In my study, I will use the tools of the intermedial approach, which will help me to describe and grasp the relations of transposition of the myth between different media that interact and influence each other in the opera under analysis.

New Perspective on Romanian Post-Communist Literature. Mihai Iovănel, History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990–2020 The article addresses Mihai Iovănel’s 2021 History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990–2020, the first history of Romanian literature that presents the development of Romanian post-communist prose and poetry. Iovănel’s book sparked a heated debate among literary critics, historians and writers, because it discusses and redefines prevalent concepts in Romanian literary theory and criticism, focusing on the extraliterary (political, social, economic) conditioning of literary production and inscribing Romanian literature into the system of transnational literary interactions. The paper shows thus the most important assumptions of Iovănel’s work and discusses the critical reception of the volume among Romanian intellectuals.