Ruralism and Literature in Romania proposes a series of academic studies of rural literature and cultural portrayals of peasantry. The topics range from re-readings of canonical works to ideological readings of modern Romanian literature, rural novels of the Romanian socialist realism and post-communist literary trends centred around rural life. The three sections of the volume, "The Novel," "Literary Criticism and Social Action," and "Poetry" focus on the intervention of the nineteenth and twentieth-century cultural elites in the discussions of peasantry, on the role of ideology in...

Drawing on methodologies pertaining to Digital Humanities, World Literature, and Comparative Literature, the volume aims to challenge some of the enduring cliches regarding the literary production of Romanian communism. The first section focuses on socialist realism, socialist modernism, representations of the rural, and rural modernity. The second section deals with literary cosmopolitanism, literary dissidence, countercultural literary production, minority literatures in Romania, and the relationship between genre fiction and state politics. The third section looks at the communist literary...