<i>Romanian Literature as World Literature</i> 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 … <i>RLWL</i> 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 <i>Weltliteratur</i>, 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reject the notion that a literature can be confined within political boundaries—that it can, in a sense, be withdrawn from the wider zones of literature and culture and still remain creative ...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

This volume is an overdue contribution, revising narratives about Romanian literature, using a contemporary theoretical framework that speaks from several directions. ... The chapters would make good additions to classes on Romanian and East European literature, culture, history. The articles focusing on émigré figures like Celan, Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco, Codrescu, Müller and Manea, as well as on the transnational writing style of the 80s generation of poets are also well suited to those willing to engage in the transnational elements of French, American or German literatures. More theoretically inclined articles like the introduction by the editors, Martin’s analysis of socialist realism, and the article on comparative postcolonialism by Stefanescu, work well in comparative contexts of literary or cultural theory.

Slavic and East European Journal

The questions raised in the preface by the editors of the volume are perfectly in tune with the recent attempts in the field of literary criticism to adapt the concept of world literature to the evolution of a world less and less interested in theart of the written word…This new means of approaching the literary phenomenon in a wider sense favours the marginal literatures that thus overcome their conjectural limitations or the peripheral areas in relation with the major literatures; in the context of the crisis of the nation-state, the critical endeavour to fortify the national literatures on linguistic bases is no longer operable. From this viewpoint, the volume <i>Romanian Literature as World Literature </i>is of unquestionable importance, not only for the relation between the Romanian literature and the other, geographically more or less close literatures, but also for our own literary history and for the evolution of current literary studies.

Philobiblon

<i>Romanian Literature as World Literature</i> decidedly contributes to connecting the wider world with Romanian literature and vice versa by undertaking the effort not only to translate Romanian literature to the world, but to translate it for the world in a manner that is already of the world.

Canadian Review of Comparative Literature

'Is Romanian literature a world literature?' Such is the opening line of this truly impressive book, and such is also the central issue Martin, Terian, and Moraru—a major expert of the 'planetary turn'—are dealing with. The question’s answer is multifaceted, as all world cultures are. Romanian literature is a huge crossroad, one of the most fascinating ones, in Europe and beyond, and this is exactly what the riveting <i>Romanian Literature as World Literature</i> tells us about.

Bertrand Westphal, Professor of General and Comparative Literature, University of Limoges, France, and author of Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (2007)

In every dimension—overall quality of contributions, internal logic, and introductory material—<i>Romanian Literature as World Literature</i> bears stunning testimony to its subject matter. Infused and beset with historical, political, and linguistic complexity at every turn, the volume’s world-class collective authorship builds upon the latest current advances in world-systems and postcolonial theories. <i>Romanian Literature as World Literature</i> is particularly admirable for the diversity of approaches, ranging from intellectual and cultural history to close exegesis, that it encompasses. In illuminating the multiple forces and influences bearing upon Romanian literature, it attests to the conceptual difficulties attending any putatively national cultural ecology.

Henry Sussman, Visiting Professor Germanic Languages & Literatures, Yale University, USA, and author of Playful Intelligence: Digitizing Tradition (Bloomsbury, 2014)

Render[s] specialist concepts both approachable and vivid. The language is interactive, variegated, and expressive … Even better, I found this to be a homogeneous quality despite the theory’s denseness, making this, in full sincerity, one of the few textbooks that I would reread. Moreover, the intelligence of the argument at hand is evinced by the virtue of clarity, and the effort to propose germane solutions to the dilemmas of our day. <i>Romanian Literature as World Literature</i> seeks to allow the politico-geographic underdog to shine in an unprecedented way as well as to explore how Romanian literature has “functioned.” In a wider context, what I found heartening was the conviction that literature is something that genuinely binds people in rarely encountered emotional or psychological harmony: an interest in the human experience as such.

World Literature Today