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.

Examines translations by canonical Romanian writers Lucian Blaga, Constantin Noica, and Emil Cioran, arguing that that their works reveal a new, "minor" mode of national identity.

World literature was long defined in North America as an established canon of European masterpieces, but an emerging global perspective has challenged both this European focus and the very category of "the masterpiece." The first book to look broadly at the contemporary scope and purposes of world literature, What Is World Literature? probes the uses and abuses of world literature in a rapidly changing world. In case studies ranging from the Sumerians to the Aztecs and from medieval mysticism to postmodern metafiction, David Damrosch looks at the ways works change as they move from national to global contexts. Presenting world literature not as a canon of texts but as a mode of circulation and of reading, Damrosch argues that world literature is work that gains in translation. When it is effectively presented, a work of world literature moves into an elliptical space created between the source and receiving cultures, shaped by both but circumscribed by neither alone. Established classics and new discoveries alike participate in this mode of circulation, but they can be seriously mishandled in the process. From the rediscovered Epic of Gilgamesh in the nineteenth century to Rigoberta Menchú's writing today, foreign works have often been distorted by the immediate needs of their own editors and translators. Eloquently written, argued largely by example, and replete with insightful close readings, this book is both an essay in definition and a series of cautionary tales.

Romanian writers past and present talk about the literary life in their country

The volume contains new interpretations of literary production in Romanian communism. It focuses on socialist realism and representations of the rural, literary dissidence and countercultural literary production, transnational communist literary production, the Romanian polysystem during the ideological thaw, and forms of literary dissidence.

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.

Part visceral dream-memoir, part fictive journey through a hallucinatory Bucharest, Mircea Cărtărescu’s Blinding was one of the most widely heralded literary sensations in contemporary Romania, and a bestseller from the day of its release. Riddled with hidden passageways, mesmerizing tapestries, and whispering butterflies, Blinding takes us on a mystical trip into the protagonist’s childhood, his memories of hospitalization as a teenager, the prehistory of his family, a traveling circus, Secret police, zombie armies, American fighter pilots, the underground jazz scene of New Orleans, and the installation of the communist regime. This kaleidoscopic world is both eerily familiar and profoundly new. Readers of Blinding will emerge from this strange pilgrimage shaken, and entirely transformed. From the Trade Paperback edition.