THE NATIONAL NO MANʼS LAND. IMAGINING RURALITY IN THE ROMANIAN LITERARY HISTORIES
THE NATIONAL NO MANʼS LAND. IMAGINING RURALITY IN THE ROMANIAN LITERARY HISTORIES

Summary/Abstract: This paper analyzes the concurrent perspectives of the three Romanian literary histories (E. Lovinescu, History of Contemporary Romanian Literature – 1926–1929, N. Iorga, History of Contemporary Romanian Literature – 1934, G. Călinescu, History of Romanian Literature from Its Origins to the Present – 1941), in which rurality acquires the status of central constitutive factor of the theoretical and analytical system. Despite their programmatically divergent historiographical conceptions, Lovinescu, Iorga and Călinescu share – not at all paradoxically – almost similar (abstract, atemporal, aesthetic) projections of the rural universe. Consequently, the imagined rurality in the three histories of Romanian literature puts into crisis precisely what it should have underlined: their historical and/or national character.

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