Paradigma căilor ferate în literatura româna şi americană
The railway paradigm in American and Romanian literature

Summary/Abstract: The present approach is based on a fictional model which poses the striking question: what the Middle Ages would have been had railroads existed back then, and what an American 19th century would have been without railways – challenges issued from Mark Twain’s novel An Yankee at the King Arthur Court and Nobel laureate Robert Fogel’s Railroads and American Economic Growth .Fogel’s imaginary was designed as a mathematical computerized model of the American economy lacking railroads. In the Romanian society, railroads were regarded mostly as a model of novelty; there is a frenzy of progress powered by trains and railways, although the great writers approaches differ. Eminescu’s poem reads as by railways cane they, all the songs diminish/vanish. Caragiale a great railroad (he owned a restaurant in Buzau Station, a client of Gherea’s restaurant in Ploiesti Station), depicts a society which is changing, not necessarily for the better and characters with nonsensical wishes.

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