Carmen Sylva, Queen Elisabeth of Romania, and the Invention of a Royal Children’s Literature
Carmen Sylva, Queen Elisabeth of Romania, and the Invention of a Royal Children’s Literature

Author(s): Maria Iordan
Subject(s): Cultural history, Political history, Social history, Romanian Literature, 19th Century, Theory of Literature, Sociology of Literature
Published by: Addleton Academic Publishers
Keywords: Carmen Sylva; children’s literature; royal authorship; Romanian monarchy; fairy tales; legends; national culture; moral education; Peleș Castle; fin-de-siècle literature;
Summary/Abstract: Building on recent scholarship on royal authorship and children’s literature, this article argues that Carmen Sylva’s writings for young readers should be understood not as marginal or purely didactic productions, but as a coherent literary project with distinct aesthetic, cultural, and political ambitions (Nixon, 2014, Zimmermann, 2020, Introduction). Writing at a moment when the Romanian monarchy was consolidating its symbolic authority, Sylva mobilized the fairy tale and the legend as privileged genres through which to articulate an affective relationship between sovereign, land, and people (Mudure, 2023; Zimmermann, 2020, Introduction). Her children’s literature thus participates in broader European debates on education, morality, and national culture, while simultaneously responding to the specific historical and cultural conditions of a newly established kingdom at the fin de siècle (Nixon, 2017, Zipes, 2012; Warner, 1994).

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