Nationalizing International Prestige: Foreign Literatures in Romanian Interwar Periodicals

Drawing from recent developments in the field of World Literature, but also earlier attempts at mapping local cultural traditions, contexts, and affinities, our proposal attempts to investigate the dominant patterns of cultural criticism within the literary publications active during the interwar period. Using an exhaustive resource of metadata related to the relations between Romanian literature and foreign literatures developed over the span of twenty years, we plot a network abstraction focused on revealing patterns and trends of reception within Romanian cultural magazines. This process of “topic modeling” cultural criticism will serve to illustrate the dominant subject matters present in the Romanian cultural press. Following our data analysis, we will attempt to provide an explanatory model of “theory production” in Romanian literary culture that accounts for the seemingly “ahistorical” nature of autochthonous localizations.