Political Fiction or Fiction about Politics. How to Operationalize a Fluid Genre in the Interwar Romanian Literature

Résumé

The marginal position into which political fiction was pushed, in modern times, is a predictable result of the literary canon relying on the strict principle of aesthetic autonomy. More than a few leading scholars dismissed it as a non-literary or a “bastardized” category, while others undertook constructing its theory. After reviewing some of their trials (and errors), the article puts forward a possible way of looking at the distribution of the genre in the interwar Romanian literary system. As an eclectic class, depending essentially on extra-aesthetic contexts, the political novel or the novel about politics was highly affected, in its fused narrative and ideological patterns, by the installation of communism. Until then, and particularly between the wars, writers experimented with many ways to interweave literature and ideology, resulting in a variegated and, sometimes, puzzling offer on the cultural market. Today’s researchers interested in mapping this dense landscape may find a valuable tool in the computer-assisted analysis.