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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]

Following the 2020 article on identity diversity in the Romanian novel, this study provides both a statistical account and individual examples of fictional representations of characters in the Romanian novel between 1933-1947. With a three-fold structure, our essay focuses at first on gender diversity, analyzing the ratios between female and male authors and female and male protagonists. It then concentrates on religious, ethnic, and national minorities, using both quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis, exploring how they are represented and approached. Without drawing any definitive conclusions, our undertaking provides a blueprint for further research on identity representations in the Romanian novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combining the instruments of quantitative analysis with those of genre theory, the present article studies the ratio, characteristics, and tendencies underpinning the most important subgenres of the Romanian novel between 1901 and 1932. Among these subgenres, we lay special emphasis on those of popular fiction, on the social, historical, sentimental, psychological, and philosophical novel, as well as on the so-called "event novel". The conclusions of our inquiry illustrate the ever-growing divide between artistic literature and popular fiction, the recasting of the Romanian novelistic subgenres during the early 20th century, and the gradual relocation of the novelists' focus from the unmediated depiction of events towards the world and the individual self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following study employs a quantitative analysis of the Romanian novelistic production from the period 1901- 1932. By using the literary corpus developed by the research project ASTRA Data Mining. The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel 1901-1932, implemented by ASTRA National Museum Complex, this paper focuses on the secondary canonical writers (with their "b-sides and rarities"), the novelists'origins, the abundance and the geographical nodes of production, in order to investigate the dynamic relation between national cultural centers and their respective editorial networks, as well as the mechanisms of canonization within the Romanian novel of the period [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following a two-pronged line of argumentation, our article seeks to analyze and evaluate the current state of quantitative approaches applied to Romanian literature within the context and framework of one of the most prominent emergent fields of literary studies: quantitative formalism. Thus, on the one hand, the paper will attempt to present the most well-known lexicographic instruments currently used in quantitative studies in Romania (The Chronological Dictionary of the Romanian Novel from its Origins to 1989, The Chronological Dictionary of Translated Novels in Romania from its Origins to 1989, and The Bibliography of the Relations between Romanian Literature and Foreign Literatures in Periodicals 1919–1944), and, on the other, to employ the emerging methods that make use of these instruments, alongside their inherent limitations and the pragmatic issues that concern them) as a starting point for a debate on the current state of theoretical and critical approaches to the study of literature in the Romanian academic field. A selective and detailed application of the quantitative methodologies in question, as they are theorized by scholars such as Franco Moretti ("distant reading") or Matthew L. Jockers ("macroanalysis") will be another focal point of our paper, as it will seek to further illustrate the manner in which a meta-reflection on the approach itself can encourage the further development of quantitative methods in the study of Romanian literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tries to adapt recent methodologies used in literary studies such as macroanalysis and quantitative research to the Romanian novel from the first half of the twentieth century. The main focus of the present paper is on the erotic novel and its evolution from a simple literary exercise that followed Western plot patterns to its aesthetic apex in the 30s. By employing the theories or Franco Moretti, the article also attempts to reveal the trajectory of the erotic novel as a literary mirror into the modernisation of Romanian literature itself. Aspects such as import literature (as narrative models) and the circulation of Western literary trends in the Romanian cultural field will also be kept in mind for the purpose of understanding of how Romanian prose developed over the course of the aforementioned period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]