Ștefan Baghiu - Böcker

Ruralism and Literature in Romania proposes a series of academic studies of rural literature and cultural portrayals of peasantry. The topics range from re-readings of canonical works to ideological readings of modern Romanian literature, rural novels of the Romanian socialist realism and post-communist literary trends centred around rural life. The three sections of the volume, "The Novel," "Literary Criticism and Social Action," and "Poetry" focus on the intervention of the nineteenth and twentieth-century cultural elites in the discussions of peasantry, on the role of ideology in portraying the peasant during the interwar period and postwar literature, and on off-centre topics such as zoopoetics and artificial intelligence in the rural literature.

Drawing on methodologies pertaining to Digital Humanities, World Literature, and Comparative Literature, the volume aims to challenge some of the enduring clichés regarding the literary production of Romanian communism. The first section focuses on socialist realism, socialist modernism, representations of the rural, and rural modernity. The second section deals with literary cosmopolitanism, literary dissidence, countercultural literary production, minority literatures in Romania, and the relationship between genre fiction and state politics. The third section looks at the communist literary production from a transnational perspective, exploring the Romanian polysystem during the ideological thaw, as well as forms of literary dissidence across the Soviet bloc.

With the acceleration of the globalization process over the last decades, the understanding of translations as privileged forms of cultural interference has constantly advanced. However, a translational approach to national cultures is absent from the concerns of histories of national literatures published to date. The overall objective of the book is to investigate the systemic impact of translations on the evolution of the Romanian novel, from its inception to the present day. This systemic approach consists of a two-fold analysis (quantitative and morphological), while the term ‘evolution’ refers to the development of the phenomenon in relation to the agents that have fashioned its dynamics—not only cultural but also political, social, or economic.