Romanian Literature as World Literature is an ambitious enterprise to synthesize some important contemporary pieces of research on world literature while introducing the Romanian literature's 'worldliness' to an international readership. Instead of reducing the comparative investigations to a search for causal, mechanical and hierarchical types of influence exerted by world literature on Romanian literature, or investigating the latter's sporadic occurrences on the 'great stage' of literature in the major languages, the volume offers a more complex (and more interesting) way to reveal the multiple types of relationships they keep. ... The geopolitical reading proposed by the Romanian Literature as World Literature has certainly a political dimension, as it overtly criticizes the essentialist concept of the national literature which leads to cultural insularism, chauvinism, and hard-line nationalism. ... [It] is a committed piece of scholarship, which is aware of its performative power, aware of its responsibility to represent the connection of the national and the worldly to avoid the dangers of cultural insularism on the one hand, and of self-colonization on the other.

Central European Cultures

“[Romanian Literature as World Literature] exhaustively examines and clearly displays the magnitude and value of Romanian literature, as it is more often than not regarded as “peripheral” or not European “enough”. Furthermore, this volume gives voice to our heritage as Romanians by making our literature transnational. The multifaceted approach gives way to both a comprehensive overview of this challenge and development associated with Romanian literature read as world literature, which proves to be important for future research and reflection.”

Transilvania

“Published by Bloomsbury in the series Literatures as World Literature, this is a well-timed book looking to reshape the history of Romanian literature and culture for the twenty-first century. For all its diversity, the book has a common drive: its contributors – the youngest generation of Romanian literary scholars – are devising tools and coining analytical categories with which to revisit the scenarios of the existing Romanian literary histories and to (re)chart modern Romanian literature … Overall, this study stands out first and foremost through its ability to ask the most pressing questions on the subject, to single out the key dilemmas and to open up relevant paths for future research. The convergent effort of the contributors to bring together literary history and comparative literature with cultural studies, translation studies and imagology is worth noting … The authors are successful throughout in deconstructing the discourse of national and ethnic essentialism, in step with the most recent developments in literary research: the replacement of the national-modular categorization of literary traditions, the “intersectional” notions of identity formation, the demise of Eurocentrism and the rise of post nationalism.”

Monica Spiridon, Recherche Littéraire/Literary Research

Romanian Literature as World Literature has a salutary effect, for it succeeds in providing a set of well-documented and pertinent answers meant to cure Romanian literature of the symptoms of nationalism … The volume published in the prestigious Bloomsbury Academic's series 'Literature as World Literature' edited by Thomas O. Beebee comprises a theoretically dense Introduction and 15 articles that demythologize the 'national reading' of literature, proposing a paradigmatic and epistemological shift that integrates Romanian literature into a nodal qua cosmopolitan and multifaceted ethno-linguistic context in which centers, hierarchies, and hegemonic claims are blurred … RLWL can serve as an indispensable tool for scrutinizing other eastern European literatures. It is, above all, a theoretical 'manifesto' that successfully revises and redefines Romanian literature as Weltliteratur, and integrates it into a global geocultural palimpsest … [T]he volume deserves a Romanian translation so as to familiarize national readers with a timely revisionist project that is apt to contribute to the making of a 21st-history of Romanian literature, and also to generate further debates among Romanian critics.

Dragos Ivana, The Comparatist

[The volume's contributors] reject the notion that a literature can be confined within political boundaries-that it can, in a sense, be withdrawn from the wider zones of literature and culture and still remain creative ... [A] pioneering and provocative volume. Its authors apply modern literary theory and analysis to reveal to the specialist and the comparatist the travails and achievements of Romanian writers in diverse intellectual climates, and they challenge long accepted frameworks for a national literature. The historian of Romanian society will also find stimulating incentives here to pursue his understanding of the Romanian phenomenon.

Keith Hitchens, Comparative Literature Studies

An open literary and political-literary manifesto of a lifestyle in an open world, without walls, and a volume with topopoetic virtues that prepares a world for meeting us.

Romanita Constantinescu, University of Heidelberg