The National No Manʼs Land. Imagining Rurality in The Romanian Literary Histories

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.