Romanian Literature as World Literature

Mircea Martin, Christian Moraru, Andrei Terian

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781501354649
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501327933
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Approaching Romanian literature as world literature, this book is a critical-theoretical manifesto that places its object at the crossroads of empires, regions, and influences and draws conclusions whose relevance extends beyond the Romanian, Romance, and East European cultural systems. This "intersectional" revisiting of Romanian literature is organized into three parts. Opening with a fresh look at the literary ideology of Romania's "national poet," Mihai Eminescu, part I dwells primarily on literary-cultural history as process and discipline. Here, the focus is on cross-cultural mimesis, the role of strategic imitation in the production of a distinct literature in modern Romania, and the shortcomings marking traditional literary historiography's handling of these issues. Part II examines the ethno-linguistic and territorial complexity of Romanian literatures or "Romanian literature in the plural." Part III takes up the trans-systemic rise of Romanian, Jewish Romanian, and Romanian-European avant-garde and modernism, Socialist Realism, exile and émigré literature, and translation.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Worlds of Romanian Literature and the Geopolitics of Reading
• Part I: The Making and Remaking of a World Literature: Revisiting Romanian Literary and Cultural History
• Part II: Literature in the Plural
• Part III: Over Deep Time, Across Long Space
• Bibliography
• Index