Academic literature on the topic 'Romanian literary criticism'

Orlando becomes a woman in Constantinople, attempting to escape the unwanted affections of Archduke Harry disguised as Archduchess Harriet Griselda of Finster-Aarhorn and Scand-op-Boom. The character of the Archduke was inspired by Henry George Charles Lascelles, 6th Earl of Harewood, one of Vita Sackville-west’s early suitors. However, in Orlando, Archduchess Harriet, lust personified, is Romanian. Echoes of Romania are faint in Virginia Woolf’s fiction, essays, and diaries, much more so than references to other Eastern European and Balkan cultures, such as Greece or Russia. On the other hand, Woolf’s influence on Romanian literature, although very strong today, has been hardly studied. In this essay, I discuss the reception of Virginia Woolf in Romania during the interwar period, by looking at reviews and critical works published about Woolf’s works. I do this in order to delineate possible connections between Woolf and Romanian writers who were her contemporaries. Although it has been traditionally thought that cultural and literary connections were stronger between Romania and France or Romania and Germany, my research of periodicals and translations from this period shows that Woolf’s works were read and often discussed by Romanian critics and readers, and that her influence was much stronger than previously thought. Especially when considering the modernist experimental novel, several reviews published in Romania at this time show that Romanian critics recognized and were influenced by the originality and value of Woolf’s modernist experiment.

The literary tradition and the production of literary histories has long focused upon “national literature,” which is to say those works written in the tongue of the country in question. As a result, writers of Romanian origin who lived in a foreign country and wrote in the language of their host country were often overlooked by Romanian critics, because such writers were considered to be exponents of the national literatures of the foreign countries in which they resided. In the case of Romanian literature, there are several generations of writers of multilingual expression, and the above dynamic has proven to be the case for a very long time. Throughout the centuries, the language of administration and culture was often different from Romanian vernacular, and the writers who managed to become internationally known were those writing in the language of culture rather than those writing in Romanian. This study analyzes the work of Andrei Codrescu, a Romanian-American writer who managed to transform his experience of exile into a “Road Scholar” (according to his film of this name) leading to a profitable university career enlightened by literature.

Due to the themes and issues dealt with in his writing, Ilie Constantin is a writer whom French literary critics praised. At the same time, he is also one of the essential figures of the Romanian literature of exile. The theme of exile runs like a thread through Constantin’s writings in French: it is both a source of inspiration and a cause of boredom and despair. It haunts in particular the collection Le lettré barbare, whose poems “Rescued from waiting” (“Délivré de l’attente”), “When there are no more voices” (“Quand il n’est plus de voix”) or “The Poets of exile” (“Les Poètes de l’exil”) are the most illustrative.

Publication of a book of literary reviews Romani krize (The Novels of Crisis) by Igor Mandić in Belgrade in 1996, as well as the book promotion in Serbia, have been the subject of sharp attacks on its author in the Croatian media. In this “case,” which Mandić himself called “the chase of the collegial choir of elite commentators” for an “insignificant book of literary reviews,” several peripheral levels that are attempted to impose as dominant or to compete for a more favorable discursive position can be distinguished. First of all, the complex of peripheral is in the very status of literary criticism, the marginal letter, inferior to the prestigious discourses of belletristic and literary theory. However, as Mandić underlined in the foreword to The Novels of Crisis, this “by status wholly devalued writing, no matter how small, could always be used as a ‘symptom’ to raise some sort of ward-heeler’s alarm.” Regardless of the ironic modus of this attitude, the “ward-heeler alarm” that followed completely departed from the subject of this Mandić’s collection, or a decade of Serbian and Croatian literary productions, from the 80’s to the 90’s. Finally, precisely this literary period, which Mandić defined as a decade after the death of J. B. Tito and M. Krleža until the break-up of the SFRY, as the last decade of literary and cultural life in a common state, after its disintegration remained on the historical periphery of newly established national canons. However, the most important peripheral level of the whole of this “case” is concerned with the approach to the body of texts that this book deals with, i.e. a comparative study of Serbian and Croatian literature. At the time it was published in 1996, from peripheral cultural positions the comparative approach to the Croatian and Serbian literature was perceived as a radical political provocation that comes from the common past, in the wake of its renewal. In this work special attention is given to Mandić’s choice of Serbian and Croatian literary titles, hence to the very content of the Novels of Crisis. However, since the cultural context of this book goes beyond the literary criticism of the decade to which it relates, its significance is looked into from the aspect of polemical discourses this book produced, even at the periphery of the Croatian nineties.