A Project of Inter-peripheral History of the Romanian Novel: The Polish Case

Résumé

The main purpose of the article is to identify the most important tendencies in the reception of the Romanian novel in Poland in the 20th and 21st century, thus proposing an original and innovative analysis of the process of the cultural transfer between these two (semi)peripheral cultures. The study focuses on a complete corpus of 95 novels written in Romanian (also by authors from the Republic of Moldova) and translated into Polish between 1931 and 2023, providing a new and comprehensive perspective on a complex issue such as an interperipheral literary exchange. The paper uses statistical and computational methods to conduct a sociological study of literature, thus exploring the social, political, and cultural circumstances that influenced the evolution of the reception of the Romanian novel in Poland, also characterizing the agencies of this phenomenon (writers and translators). Moreover, it attempts to situate the regional Polish case into a broader, global context of the reception of the Romanian novel during the last century.