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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]

The present introduction aims to outline the major theoretical approaches of spatial studies, together with their most relevant inquiries and pursuing their many methodological ramifications. Our main goal is to deliver a panoramic study engaging both traditional geocritical perspectives and contemporary transnational, quantitative, or digital studies that shaped the way in which we understand the notion of space and its literary functions. The present introduction targets national, transnational, and global projects, aiming to integrate Romanian debates in a broader, international dialogue. Our thematic issue gathers a diverse body of studies, each one of them advancing original approaches that employ comprehensive theoretical frameworks and different tools and perspectives, from symbolic geography and migrations studies to distant-reading and World Literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper aims to present, by means of a metacritical approach, the many shifts and negotiations in the history of understanding and defining the status of the novel as a literary genre, as they are retraced by Galin Tihanov in his latest book The Birth and Death of Literary Theory. Interwoven with many other aspects of Russian literary theory that reverberated within the present paradigm of comparative studies and helped shape the principal framework of world literature, Galin Tihanov's critical assumptions on the numerous trials regarding the novelistic genre in the Russian theoretical undertakings are of tremendous relevance for a field of study that engages, more than ever, in cracking the many codes of the novelistic world canon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper aims to investigate an early phase of the globalization phenomenon as it has manifested in a specific peripheral space, attempting to map, by means of both close and distant reading, how the internalization processes have been mirrored in the modern Romanian novel. The scope of my research revolves around the responses that Romanian literature - a peripheral, minor literature - has had towards transnational or global models, and how the novelistic production of the aforementioned timeframe has metabolised and illustrated the foreign input in our culture. The theoretical framework of the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article approaches a series of conceptual optimizations of the subgenres of the Romanian 19th century novels established by the Chronological Dictionary of the Romanian Novel from Origins to 1989 (2004). Starting by analyzing the corpus of works digitized for ASTRA Data Mining. The Digital Museum of the 19th Century Romanian Novel, the authors revisit possible definitions of some of the most preeminent and discussed typologies of the 19th century novel production in Romania: the outlaw novel, the social novel, the novel of manners, the rural novel, the historical novel, the sensation novel, the erotic novel, and the family novel. The central goal of the article is, therefore, to shape a taxonomy that fits the formal, thematical, and rhetorical variety of the Romanian novel in the 19th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study assesses the existing archives that gather and preserve in digital versions the Romanian novel published in the 19 th century. Digitalization projects, both in Romania and in Europe, are the main subjects of this research. Adding to this, we share the particular and common experiences of the Astra Data Mining: The Digital Museum of the 19th Century Romanian Novel in terms of the process of digitizing the 157 novels in our corpus. Other details such as the specific editions digitized, the process of selection, as well as any difficulties met along the way are also provided. At the same time, the activities of our project are also corroborated with similar European projects. In order to address our digitization practice, we also explore a theoretical and methodological framework borrowed by Stanford Literary Lab in terms of conceptualizing what the American researchers call "the published", "the archive" and "the corpus". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from the most recent developments in the field of Digital Humanities, the article showcases some of the most promising methods as well as some of the most useful tools for computational textual analysis. Textometry, stylometry and network analysis (alongside topic modelling or distributional semantics) are nowadays methods that, through the recent developments in digital formalism proposed by Matthew L. Jockers or the researchers from Stanford Literary Lab, are able to reveal literary and cultural patterns at a macroanalytical method. The article will delve into computational stylistics by testing the Stylo package, developed by Maciej Eder, Jan Rybicki and Mike Kestemont, on a sample corpus provided by the ASTRA Data Mining Project, attempting to explore the merits of such methods in the field of Romanian literary studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper aims to investigate if and how the theoretical assumptions and the ideological discourse of the Romanian literary historian and cultural figure E. Lovinescu can still be read and interpreted within contemporary, transnational frames and with new methodological tools. I propose for this study to discuss a couple of volumes, each one engaging in a different kind of approach to E. Lovinescu's impact on the Romanian cultural field, in order to test the viability of his theories, especially from a sociological and political point of view. The goal of my paper shall be to open a discussion on the ongoing role that canonical literary historians such as E. Lovinescu have on how we study, to date, Romanian literature, while also framing the rather unknown faces of socio-political discourse that this particular cultural figure has proposed over the time, aiming to present how they shaped the circulation of foreign ideologies and literary formulas. [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]

The following paper intends to investigate the main junctures and disjunctures of Romanian prose written by women in the first half of the twentieth century from a quantitative perspective. The paper will employ a macroanalysis of both the novels written in this period and the prose written by female writers, in order to establish a pattern in the modernisation and institutionalisation of Romanian literature in the inter-war period, more specifically in the 1930s, the decade that saw the emergence of the main canonical Romanian novels. The paper will also delve into the main principles and discussions surrounding early Romanian feminism. Aspects such as import literature, translations, and the circulation of Western literary trends in the Romanian cultural field will be critical to understand how Romanian prose written by women evolved over the course of the twentieth century and established an alternative literary canon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper aims to recontextualise the works of Ion Luca Caragiale by means of applying the contemporary methodologies of World Literature studies in order to inscribe the author in an international literary circuit. At the same time, the study will also try to investigate I.L. Caragiale as a transnational author, for his catalytic influence on the New Wave of Romanian cinema, by far the most exportable autochthonous cultural product. For this, the paper proposes to discuss Caragiale as an author not in the classical terms of canonicity and Romanian literary classicism, but as a continuous influence for a rather „alternative canon” that can be identified in Romanian cinematography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]