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As intellectual projects, literary histories hold a particular significance in Romanian culture; they recover authors and relegate them to anonymity, make and break canons, and promote and undermine ideologies and political agendas that reach far beyond literature and the aesthetic. “Literaturocentric,” as has been described by some, this culture has treasured literary historiography. To this very day, the greatest aspiration of most Romanian critics is to write a history of national literature—of entire Romanian literature. In certain quarters, literary histories published during the first half of the previous century are still subject to a cult of sorts. The genre, its illustrations, and the reactions to them appear to suggest that in Romania, perhaps more so than elsewhere, literary history speaks to the country’s ongoing wrestling with self-representation, to fantasies and anxieties of collective identity. This accounts for the remarkable proliferation of this critical mode and for its survival into a century that has otherwise witnessed the crisis and dearth of this form of literary scholarship. Be that as it may, one thing is clear: Romanian literary histories do not just describe a segment of culture; they are culturally descriptive and performative. They are a culture in and of themselves. They serve both as efforts to explain complex intersections between language, ideologies, and literary change and as self-referential tools for accumulating cultural capital in the interrelated fields of literature and its study.

In Romanian literary histories, Cezar Petrescu is presented as a popular writer, but one that fails to integrate his work among the canonical pieces, due to the fact that most of his novels lacked what critics called “aesthetical value.” The quantitative and transnational turns in the study of the novel in Romania set the ground for revisiting such counter-canonical authors in order to re-examine, from social and sociological perspectives, their works. Cezar Petrescu’s novels seem suited for a socio-critical analysis, therefore, in this article I aim to discuss literary representations of capitalist alienation and consumerism in Calea Victoriei, one of his most popular novels. Keywords: Cezar Petrescu, Calea Victoriei, urban novel, capitalism, alienation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our article conducts a critical reassessment of one of the most influential cultural myths in Eastern Europe throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the nationalist definition of peasantry as embodying the quintessence of the nation. In order to evaluate the imagological scope and ideological implications engendered by this so-called 'people-nation myth', we focus on the Romanian culture, whom we consider fully representative for the Eastern European context. More exactly, our study employs a distant reading of the Romanian rural novel from the first half of the twentieth century, precisely the literary subgenre supposed to reflect the coalescence between the peasantry and the nation. By analysing the co-occurrences in these novels between words belonging to the vocabularies of nation and rurality, we aim at showing that – contrary to traditional historiographic consensus – nation building has less to do with language or ethnicity, and much more to do with social emancipation. [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]

The present paper aims to investigate the circulation of foreign cultural input in one of the most important Romanian literary periodicals of the prewar era. The main focus of the present research revolves around the means by which the editorial group of ViaÈ›a Românească (The Romanian Life), have managed to create an international dialogue oriented towards Western models that helped shape the modernization of both the autochthonous literary production and the critical or theoretical national systems. Generally considered a rather reactionary community, with nationalistic tendencies, the aforementioned literary group has engaged in many occasions into transplanting foreign theoretical and critical models. The amplitude of these communications and its quite remarkable effects on the Romanian cultural scene may still come as a surprise. By means of quantitative and digital methods, the present proposal attempts to measure and investigate this very particular process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]