Le roman – un genre incertain. Les controverses de la critique littéraire bulgare et roumaine de l’entre-deux-guerres
The Novel as an Uncertain Genre. Bulgarian and Romanian Interwar Literary Criticism Debates

Summary/Abstract: Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, there were doubts as to which texts qualified as novels. This state of affairs reveals the lack of self-confidence in the merits of the national literatures, as well as a lack of satisfaction and frustration with the little accumulated literary value during the time of modern development (from the second half of the 19th century ahead). The insufficient clarity as to what constitutes a novel led to many critics belittling the significance of texts because of their brevity, authors introducing personal/ lyric/ subjective atmosphere, or in the cases when these were fragmented, of cinematographic montage techniques. This paper gives examples of exaggerated requirements in the past, introducing a series of contemporary criteria for the novelistic genre, and reevaluating in the process some of the aforementioned texts.

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