Literary and cultural images, once considered marginal to the main currents of political and institutional development in southeastern Europe, have been accorded much greater importance by scholars in recent years. In this volume Alex Drace-Francis brings together over fifteen years of work on the topic of representations of Romania and Romanians. Crossing the East-West divide, the book studies both external images of the country and people, and domestically-generated representations of Europe and 'the West'. It draws on material in a wide range of languages and offers a long-term view,...

How do literacy and the development of literary culture promote the development of a national identity? Here Alex Drace-Francis offers a well-researched and readable guide to the development of literary, educational, and printing institutions in the Romanian lands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In twenty concise yet scholarly chapters, Drace-Francis both provides a state-of-the-art overview of current knowledge, and makes an original contribution to debates about print culture, modernization, national identity, and state formation.

Do narratives make nations, and if so, did networks make this happen? The notion that national and other group identities are constructed and sustained by narratives and images has been widely postulated for several decades now. This volume contributes to this debate, with a particular emphasis on the networked, transnational nature of cultural nation-building processes in a comparative European and sometimes extra-European context. It gathers together essays that engage with objects of study ranging from poetry, prose, and political ideas to painting, porcelain, and popular song, and which...