Romantic Literature Research Articles

Strategia autoreferențialității în poezia lui Dumitru Crudu

The Strategy of Self-referentiality in Dumitru Crudu’s Poetry Surfacing Dumitru Crudu’s poetry from his first books, published before the emergence of the new fracturist movement in Romanian literature, the strategy of self-referentiality will gradually become the author’s trademark. This strategy has a double functionality, representing both a renunciation of the postmodern poetical discourses of the 80s and an embodiment of the desideratum of poetic individuation. Throughout self-referentiality, Dumitru Crudu repositions the world towards the poetic self by fragmenting it into a spectrum of personal reactions.

“Old” stories in “new” clothes – a reading of the novel The children’s crusade by Florina Ilis

Focusing on the success of Florina Ilis’ novel The children’s crusade, this article explores its potential as a literary contribution in a broader global discourse, as it could be considered “literary Romanian capital” in a discussion about world literature. While the book draws on clichéd stereotypes of Romanian society from the early 2000s, including the Ceaușescu era and the challenging transition from communism to democracy, the author uses a universal language of trauma. This allows for a wider audience to engage with the themes presented in the novel. Thus, her story becomes part of a global collection of works exploring the theme of the “children’s crusade” (including George Zabriskie Gray, Marcel Schwob, Lucian Blaga, Jerzy Andrzejewski, Thea Beckman, Gregory J. Rinaldi, Karleen Bradford, Kathleen McDonnell, Bryce Courtenay, Mario Vargas Llosa, Tullio Avoledo, amongst others). Considering the connection between continuity and innovation in Romanian literature, 75 years following Lucian Blaga’s play, with the same title, Florina Ilis employs a plot with medieval roots in her novel, which has fascinated writers worldwide, to deliver a unique perspective, in a new discourse.

Petru Popescu’s English-Language Work

The writer Petru Popescu (born 1944) entered Romanian literature in the late 1960s and almost immediately gained the interest of critics and readers. His novels were innovative not only in terms of bold themes but also of narrative strategies. This article focuses on Petru Popescu’s work written in exile in English, i.e., from the late 1970s until 2009. His texts vary significantly, as Popescu tried his hand at several literary genres, from popular novels (Before and after Edith, In Hot Blood), travelogues (Amazon Beaming), adventure novels (Almost Adam), and adolescents’ literature (Footprints in Time) to his memoir (The Return) and the more stylized memoir about his parents-in-law (The Oasis: A memoir of Love and Survival in a Concentration Camp).

La letteratura italo-romena contemporanea. Sulla migrazione che genera trasgressione

Abstract The article aims to analyze the phenomenon of transgression in Italian-language Romanian literature on the example of two novels entitled La frivolezza del cristallo liquido (2008) by Irina Turcanu and Dodici più un angelo (2012) by Ingrid Beatrice Coman. The starting point for the considerations is the hypothesis that writers who experienced migration, life under communism and negative emotions related to them may use the category of transgression in their narratives in a particularly intense way. In the cited works, the most important elements expressing transgression and its contexts are characterized. Transgression turns out to be a special narrative technique. It allows to criticize wicked human attitudes and emphasize the tragic situation of an individual who has become the object of transgressive acts.

Acca soror: Queer kinship, female homosociality, and the Amazon-huntress band in Latin literature

Despite the modern association of ancient Amazons and Diana’s huntresses with lesbianism, scholarly accounts of these groups as they appear in ancient Greek and Roman literature have rarely adverted to any hints of homoeroticism. This article re-examines several narratives concerning Amazons and huntresses in Latin literature (including Camilla in Vergil’s Aeneid and Phaedra in Seneca’s eponymous tragedy) from the perspective of queer kinship and female homosociality, demonstrating the ways in which these characters subvert traditional norms of kinship and femininity, replacing patriarchal control with female sodality, often imaged as a “sister” relationship. It suggests that, even if we do not interpret these intense homosocial bonds as erotic, we can nonetheless perceive a more radical rejection of social norms that transcends genital sexuality and merits the label of “queerness”, insofar as queerness can be defined as a resistance to normativity.

Az erdei szalonka (Scolopax rusticola L.) tavaszi vonulásának vizsgálata Erdélyben

Investigation of the migration of Woodcock (Scolopax rusticola L.) in Transylvania. Based on the results of the synchronous Woodcock counting at the ten observation points in Transylvania, it can be stated that during the spring migration starting in the second decade of February, the number of observed birds showed an increasing trend until mid-March, so the migration can peak by the second decade of March based on the overall data from the ten observation points. Comparing the results of the synchronous Woodcock census in Transylvania and the Hungarian Woodcock Monitoring, it can be stated that, the course of the migration of the species in Transylvania shows a similar dynamic to the Hungarian data (FARAGÓ et. al., 2011, 2012a, 2012b, 2012c, 2014, 2015 a, 2015b, 2016, BENDE, 2021), but its peak can be dated to about 5–15 days earlier than the maximum experienced in Hungary (third decade of March). Based on the observation data recorded at the designated observation points in the lowland and mountainous regions and the difference detected by the analysis of variance, our study results confirm the phase-delayed Woodcock migration previously reported in the Romanian literature (MĂTIEȘ & MUNTEANU, 1976, 1979, 1980). Based on our results, the maximum experienced at the designated sampling sites in the lowland region is 10. March, while in the mountainous areas it is estimated to be 20. March. Examining the relationship between birds and observation sites, we concluded that the observations were independent of the sampling area although the order (magnitude) of the frequency values varied significantly in each area, and the frequency distributions observed at each observation point can be considered similar. One single year is not enough for a statistically reliable description of the spring migration characteristics of Woodcocks. Naturally, with such a small number of items (n = 253) it is not possible to find out the reasons for the differences emerging during the migration. We could only do so with a nationwide time-series dataset including a sufficiently large number of items, and at the same time, we would like to draw attention with our study to the need for wildlife biology research in connection with this species.

Children’s exposure to aggression and stereotypes presented in fairy tales

Abstract Several authors draw attention to implicit or explicit messages about the real world, aspects that we probably think less about when choosing a story to read to young children. Examples of behavioural antimodels can be easily captured by a competent pedagogue or parent in narrative writings such as fairy tales or stories belonging to well-known writers from the international and Romanian literature. The present study envisages a qualitative investigative approach, based on semi-structured interviews, aiming to explore parents’ perceptions regarding the effect of preschoolers’ exposure to stereotypes and verbal and behavioural aggression found in many of the traditional fairy tales and most circulated stories. The results of the study were compiled by investigating the responses of the 12 participants (N=12) based on three dimensions of analysis. Thus, a first dimension focused on the vision of the effects of aggression present in literary texts on children and the way to manage passages marked by violence. The second dimension sought to identify the opinion of the parents interviewed in relation to the possible consequences of the repeated exposure of children to clichés and stereotypes. The last unit of analysis aimed to picture the participants’ beliefs regarding the need to harmonize the subjects of fairy tales and stories heard by preschoolers to the current lifestyle of today’s society. The end of the paper includes a series of discussions with reference to the educational implications, limitations of the study and future research directions.

On the Christhood of Literature. Pretexts and Subtexts of Reflexivity.

After the end of the Second World War, concurrently with the massive arrests of intellectuals, the imposition of false notions and generally valid atheistic behavior, literature--and especially Romanian prose--faced a harsh ideological regulation, being given "major objectives" of combating the bourgeois-landlord scourge, on the one hand, and glorifying the unshakable alliance between the worker and the Soviet farm-worker on the other. Any deviation was severely rebuked from the very beginning, the literary censorship and political propagandists of the proletarian ideology would despotically control every sketch, story, short story, novel (alongside with their authors). Under such conditions, the theorization of the narrative model of the prose writer Fănuș Neagu can outline a critical synthesis image of the entire Romanian post-war prose--or of a spectrum as wide as possible--the lasting element of which is lyricism, as the main feature of the Romanian novel of that period, an epic species nourished artistically from the balladesque tradition of the folk literature, on the one hand, and from the "taking over" from and "fitting" to the narrative techniques of European literature, especially the French one as well. The rise in Romanian literature of Fănuş Neagu symbolized the "necessary adjustment" (Eugen Simion), the illustrious revenge in front of the totalitarian stigma, just as the debut of Ion Druţă in the ankylosing landscape of Bessarabian literature meant the proof of firm qualities of deep renewal of the undisguised epic, definitively abandoning the straitjacket of communist ideology. Fănuş Neagu, as Ion Druță, abolished the "ideological front", "unslaved" the post-war prose and removed the rigid dogmatic barriers.

Exilul unui scriitor în peisaj marin: depre criză, agonie și poate altă soartă

The text reveals an aspect of the theoretical-didactic concept of „exile of literature/literature in exile”. It is important to specify that, in this conceptual instance, the didactic aspect of studying Romanian literature in high school regarding the life and work of writers is also built. One of them is represented by Virgil Tănase, who is a prominent personality of the Romanian diaspora in the French cultural space, with an exceptional journalistic and professional activity: prose writer, playwright, director, journalist and professor in prestigious institutions in France, doctor in sociology and in the semiology of arts and letters. In literature, Virgil Tănase assumes the Romanian oneirism formula as a compensatory fictional space. The confessions of the writer, made on the occasion of some interviews, include the discourse on literature and the status of the artist in the era of Nationalist Socialism, and, at the same time, direct metatextually towards the identification of an assumed literary „interiority”. In today’s society, when it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate values from surrogates, Virgil Tănase formulates a final exhortation for the creators of literature, that of continuing to write authentically, regardless of time or space. Prolific writer, Virgil Tănase will forever remain an integrative spirit, having the aspiration and vocation to capture everything: the era in which he lives, the spirit of the world from which he comes, the human soul.

Parenting Styles - A Qualitative Analysis of the Specialized Romanian Literature

"Parenting approaches reflect the varied tactics and methodologies parents adopt while guiding and nurturing their offspring, including both behavioral and emotional tendencies in their relationship with their child as they mature. These approaches significantly mold children's self-worth, conduct, academic achievements, and interpersonal relations. How parents engage with their children and the way they assert their authority can leave lasting impressions on the emotional, social, and behavioral growth of the child. Thus, adopting a flexible parenting method that caters to the distinctive requirements of each child is essential for the wholesome evolution of their character, given that personality arises from a blend of genetic factors, social environments, and personal experiences. In Romania, these parenting methodologies might differ due to cultural traditions, educational histories, and familial values. There's a considerable amount of national research investigating how these parenting methods affect child development and welfare. This article intends to offer a comprehensive review of the literature that discusses parenting methodologies in a Romanian setting. This review will delve deep into the core theories of parenting approaches and pinpoint exemplary strategies. In summation, given the profound impact of parenting methods on a child's growth, it's crucial for parents to introspect and choose their child-rearing techniques thoughtfully. Employing a well-adjusted parenting approach that recognizes the individual necessities of each child is pivotal for their overall well-being and emotional stability. "

Cities, Networks, and Hierarchies: A Systematic Model of Romanian Novel

This article sets out to observe the manner in which using the city as a narrative scenario can determine the creation of a systemic model of knowledge. Based on Morillo’s theory that urban spaces can be analyzed by observing the interaction between the networks they belong to and the hierarchies they form, eventually becoming “hubs of knowledge,” we try to prove that the Romanian novels of the late nineteenth century and the interwar period are valuable points of reference for sketching a systemic model of the South-East European space. The specificity of Romanian literature, reflecting historical conditions and relations with empires such as the Austro-Hungarian or Ottoman empires, as well as the constitution of labor relations through the transition from rural to accelerated urbanization produces a viable matrix. These aspects can be encountered in the novels of Romanian writers such as Ioan Slavici and Liviu Rebreanu, who reflect the reality of the Transylvanian space and the relations between the communities of Romanians, Germans, Saxons or Swabians, Hungarians and Jews, to Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, the writer who creates the image of Bucharest as part of the European urban network, even if it is hierarchically subordinate to Paris.

Writing trans histories with an ethics of care, while reading gender in imperial Roman literature

AbstractTwo major barriers interfere with writing trans histories of the premodern world: the conflict between creating a legible or foreignised past and balancing the vastness of the social system of gender against individual performances of gender identity. In this article, I propose one methodology to bypass these barriers. Additionally, this methodology reminds us that both gender and history are systems which we use to generate narratives about ourselves and that these narratives always care for and nourish certain people. Here, I issue a call for trans historians to unabashedly write histories that care for and nourish trans lives.

A Symptomatic Reading on Meyer’s Twilight Series: Some Vicarious Lessons Overview

This paper analyzes the problems or conflicts related to the character of Bella Swan who colors the plot in the Twilight series written by Stephenie Meyer, a popular literary romance genre with a vampire theme, a New York Times Best Seller, that consists of four (4) series, namely Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn. The author uses the Symptomatic Reading theory based on several expert opinions and basic theories about romance and fantasy, as well as several other expert opinions about this work. Written from the perspective of the main character, Bella, the four Twilight series explicitly and implicitly show some of the problems or conflicts that Bella experienced as a young girl approaching adulthood. The conflicts she experiences stem from his family, herself, and her love life. By analyzing this series of novels, the author not only presents the differences between ideological matters and the facts or reality of the main character's problems, but also raises a new understanding or perhaps more precisely an acknowledgment of the realities that underlie family circumstances, choices and desires of an individual like Bella. Through this analysis, some values or discussions can be drawn and overviewed and can be taken into consideration for the teaching and learning in literature classes, or for the general readers and movie goers in general; bearing in mind that popular literature is no longer a topic to be taken lightly, but must be criticized and benefited from in this era of media and technology, which, in turn, greatly influences the popular culture itself. Thus, it is hoped as well that there will be a balance in knowledge and decision-making in discussions about popular literature.

Irony and sentiment in the literary field: Prešeren’s sonnets and the Slovenian alphabet-censorship war

Restoration censorship forced European Romantic literature to retreat from society and politics into subjective intimacy, fantasy, mythology, history, and exotic places. In addition to conforming to restrictions, however, censorship also led writers to evade its control (pseudonyms, publication abroad, allusive style) and, more rarely, to overt or covert rebellion (petitions, satire, etc.). An example of this is the German sonnets written by the Slovenian romanticist France Prešeren in the mid-1830s as a poetic response to the public controversy over the cultural strategies of national revival (the so-called Slovenian ABC war) and the behind-the-scenes struggles over the censorship of the poetry almanac Krajnska čbelica (Carniolan Bee). With their illocutionary force, Prešeren’s sonnets are directed against prominent collaborators of censorship and the centers of ecclesiastical and secular power that wanted to keep the embrionic Slovenian literary field under their control. These poems move between satirical irony and sentiment, between the fictional suspension of dominant positions in the field and the search for sympathy for the depressing lack of consecration. The satire against the censors of his elegy dedicated to Matija Čop stands out with its acrostic and the affect of rage.

David Lurie and the ‘Disease of Romanticism’: The Transnational and Transcultural Afterlives of Goethe and Kleist in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

My paper studies J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) to understand the transnational, transcultural mutations of two key figures of German Romanticism: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich von Kleist. Coetzee’s novels are reflections and reproductions of his extensive reading of politics and literature; these texts grant the lives and works of old masters a renewal, a re-introspection, and most importantly, a resurrection into contemporaneity. Set in post-apartheid South Africa, Disgrace operates as a site of racial and sexual contentions. Through the character of David Lurie, Coetzee initiates a dialogue between the 'visions' of the former colonizer and the ‘revisions’ of the newly emancipated colonized. While the scholarship on the Romantic element in Disgrace (Beard 2007; Easton 2007; Hawkins 2009; and Cass 2013) is predominantly centred on the afterlife of British Romanticism, more particularly, on the roles Byron and Wordsworth play in shaping plot and action, I attempt to read the novel in the light of Coetzee’s critical prose to understand how he draws upon the German Romantic tradition. If Wordsworth and Byron are evoked to characterize the outer, more conspicuous texture of the novel, then the inner, hidden threads that stitch the form and content together are borrowed from Goethe and Kleist. I argue that Coetzee’s romantic sensibility is as much German as British. These two traditions are brought together in Disgrace to re-enact four major leitmotifs of Romantic literature—desire, transgression, punishment, and finally, salvation—in a transformed political dispensation.

Parody in Literature: A Culture-Determined View

The integration of the author into the cultural context is a two-faceted problem. In the post-information age, literary parody is regarded as a way of socio-cultural communication. The article features the congeniality of two chronologically distant works of science fiction against their contemporary context, namely Edgar Allan Poe’s Ligeia and Loss of Breath vs. Ray Bradbury’s Emissary and There Was an Old Woman. This pioneering research is an attempt to trace how the genre of science-fiction short story changed from the age of European Gothic to the era of mass literature, as well as to define the role of the cultural and social context of the New World in this process. The author reduced the short stories into two conditional pairs to demonstrate the hidden connections between the two sets. The methods of narrative analysis, literary comparison, and the theory of intertextuality revealed a multiple latent presence of other texts. In his Ligeia, E. A. Poe borrowed the genre conventions of the English Gothic novel while parodying the grandiloquent style of the French Romantic literature and the rhetoric of fear typical of the German Gothic style. R. Bradbury, in his turn, imitated the style and subject matter of Poe-esque extravaganzas while parodying the plot composition and artistic language employed by his older contemporary H. P. Lovecraft. Ultimately, the study revealed the evolutionary similarity of the two poetics of parody. In their early career, both Poe and Bradbury mocked the style of popular magazines. Later, both writers came to the parody of the literary classic and focused on high examples of parody art. Poe and Bradbury contributed to the development of the genre of parody in the XIX and XX centuries, respectively. The article marks the ten-year anniversary of Ray Bradbury's death.

THE WISE MAN AND THE SEA: EPICUREANS ON SEA STORMS, SHIPWRECK, AND CHANCE

The idea that the sea is a dangerous and alien element in which one is at the mercy of higher powers, is deeply imbedded in Mediterranean culture, and has many parallels in Greek and Roman literature. From an Epicurean point of view, however, such higher powers belong to the realm of irrational beliefs which could threaten one's ἀταραξία (‘peace of mind’). What counts in Epicureanism is the rational calculus of all factors in order to minimize the influence of τύχη (‘chance’) on one's endeavours. This article explores how the Epicureans thought about the sea and its many dangers. It tries to establish under which circumstances the sage will travel by sea and gives special attention to Diogenes of Oenoanda's letter (fr. 71 + NF 214 + fr. 72 + fr. 70) about the shipwreck of Niceratus and his friends’ failure to minimize the agency of chance.

Children’s Games and Adult Repentance: Concept of Childhood in Literature of Early 20th Century

This article describes the transformation of the image of the child in literature during the 10-30s of the 20th century. The stories of three contemporary authors are used as material, which are connected by motifs of enlightenment and repentance: “The Day of the Boy” by F. Verfel, “The Paper Kite” by Lu Xin, and “On Tenderness” by Nadezhda Teffi. The basis for comparative analysis is the biographical similarities, close circle of philosophical and aesthetic interests of Austrian, Chinese, and Russian authors, as well as the genre and thematic proximity of the texts. The researcher assumes that increased attention to the image of the child arises in the early 19th century in Romantic literature, which interprets it either as a victim or as an angel. However, in the second half of the 19th century, images of “evil children” begin to appear. The analysis shows that under the influence of Freud, the motive of children’s games as a way to familiarize oneself with evil, temptation, and inevitable experiences during development consistently emerges in literature of the early 20th century. The common form of reminiscence present in all three texts allows the authors to interpret childhood events causally and derive later moral experiences from children’s games. The article concludes that Verfel’s, Lu Xin’s, and Teffi’s stories are influenced by Freud’s idea of the interconnection between childhood impressions and the fate of adults, who must comprehend past shame, guilt, and repentance.

:In Common Things: Commerce, Culture, and Ecology in British Romantic Literature

:<i>In Common Things: Commerce, Culture, and Ecology in British Romantic Literature</i>

Povestea unei gazete moartă în proiect: „Steaua Bucovinei”

After the disappearance of the newspaper „Bucovina. Gazetă pentru religie, politică și literatură” (1848–1850), at the beginning of 1864 optimistic news began to appear in the press outside Bukovina, which announced the imminent appearance of a long-awaited church gazette in this province – a territory lacking local printed information, if we do not take into account the German newspaper “Bukowina. Landes- und Amtszeitung”. The project of starting a religious gazette belonged to local personalities of the time, both churchmen and laymen (Bishop Eugenie Hacman, Samuil Andrievici, G. Hurmuzachi, I. G. Sbiera, Pavel Paicu etc.). Our article will follow step by step, according to press information, the evolution of the “event”. We hope that archival documents will fully clarify the ins and outs of this project which initially failed, but later came to life in another form, i. e. as „Foaia Soțietății pentru Literatura și Cultura Română în Bucovina” [Journal of the Society for Romanian Literature and Culture in Bukovina].