Romanian Style Nation-building in Radu Rosetti’s Early 20th Century Fiction Cover Image

Romanian Style Nation-building in Radu Rosetti’s Early 20th Century Fiction
Romanian Style Nation-building in Radu Rosetti’s Early 20th Century Fiction

Author(s): Onoriu Colăcel
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies
Published by: Editura Tracus Arte
Keywords: Western-oriented discourse; ethnocentrism; threshold-identity; nation and modernization; Romanianism

Summary/Abstract: The narrative fiction which openly claims to document the patriotic agenda of modernization is proper to the literature of newly constituted national states. On the margins of the western and the eastern worlds, the self-aware Romanian Radu Rosetti writes fictional accounts of the past which fit the profile. During the last two hundred years or so, Romanians underwent a continuous major change which consists in learning western habits and values. This westernizing narrative is underpinned by notions of alterity, clash of civilizations, marginality, etc. Rosetti’s fiction foregrounded some of the commonplace phrases in Romanian historiography, later to become the popular paradigm of the nation’s cultural memory: the anti-Russian and the pro-French feelings, the issue of the Roma community, the Latin country in the eastern-European Slavic world, the founding fathers Alexandru Ioan Cuza and Prince Charles of Hohenzollern, etc.

  • Issue Year: X/2014
  • Issue No: 2 (20)
  • Page Range: 133-140
  • Page Count: 8
  • Language: English