Can the Foreigner Speak? Reflecting the World in the Romanian Novel 1844-1947

Abstract

The following article will attempt a partly quantitative analysis of the Romanian novel from 1844 to 1947, drawing on the archive of the Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel. I will try to deliver an insight into how a South-East European literature, the Romanian one, has “reflected” the world – in several of its possible instances – over the span of little more than a century, thereby revealing its symbolic position in the European “world-system.” Its status will be indirectly quantified by looking at three different distances: to the West, to itself and its surrounding geographical setting, and to exotic, non-European geographies, by looking not at geography per se, but at representations of “the foreign,” i.e., of foreign nationals. These three perspectives are meant to pin the Romanian novelistic production on the map of European literature in conjunction to three fundamentally different and crucially influential cultural markers: the influence of the West as aspirational hub for the Romanian intelligentsia during the century of novelistic production, the manner in which the “interimperial” (in the sense given to this term by Manuela Boatcă and Anca Pârvulescu (Pârvulescu and Boatcă) drawing on Laura Doyle) position has determined different facets of self-representation, and lastly the depiction of exotic and foreign spaces and nationals, and how Romanian novelistic voices, otherwise self-deprecating in regard to the European core, adopted – to a certain degree – a European voice, Orientalizing the foreign.