ContributorsPreface and AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Worlds of Romanian Literature and the Geopolitics of ReadingChristian Moraru (University of North Carolina, Greenboro, USA) and Andrei Terian (Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania)Part I: The Making and Remaking of a World Literature: Revisiting Romanian Literary and Cultural History1. Mihai Eminescu: From National Mythology to the World PantheonAndrei Terian (Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania)2. Aux portes de l’Orient, and Through: Nicolae Milescu, Dimitrie Cantemir, and the “Oriental” Legacy of Early Romanian LiteratureBogdan Cretu (Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Romania)3. "Soft" Commerce and the Thinning of Empires: Four Steps Toward Modernity Caius Dobrescu (University of Bucharest, Romania)4. Beyond Nation Building: Literary History as Transnational Geolocation Alex Goldis (Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania)5. After “Imitation”: Aesthetic Intersections, Geocultural Networks, and the Rise of Modern Romanian Literature Carmen Musat (University of Bucharest, Romania)Part II: Literature in the Plural6. Reading Microliterature: Language, Ethnicity, PolyterritorialityMircea A. Diaconu (Stefan cel Mare University of Suceava, Romania)7. Trees, Waves, Whirlpools: Nation, Region, and the Reterritorialization of Romania’s Hungarian LiteratureImre József Balázs (Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj, Romania)8. Cosmopolites, Deracinated, étranjuifs: Romanian Jews in the International Avant-GardeOvidiu Morar (Stefan cel Mare University of Suceava, Romania)9. Communicating Vessels: The Avant-Garde, Antimodernity, and Radical Culture in Romania between World War I and World War IIPaul Cernat (University of Bucharest, Romania)Part III: Over Deep Time, across Long Space10. Temporal Webs of World Literature: Rebranding Games and Global Relevance after World War II—Mircea Eliade, E. M. Cioran, Eugène Ionesco Mihai Iovanel (G. Calinescu Institute of Literary History and Literary Theory of the Romanian Academy, Romania)11. A Geoliterary Ecumene of the East: Socialist Realism—The Romanian CaseMircea Martin (University of Bucharest, Romania)12. Romanian Modernity and the Rhetoric of Vacuity: Toward a Comparative Postcolonialism Bogdan Stefanescu (University of Bucharest, Romania)13. Gaming the World-System: Creativity, Politics, and Beat Influence in the Poetry of the 1980s GenerationTeodora Dumitru (G. Calinescu Institute of Literary History and Literary Theory of the Romanian Academy, Romania)14. How Does Exile Make Space? Contemporary Romanian Émigré Literature and the Worldedness of Place: Herta Müller, Andrei Codrescu, Norman ManeaDoris Mironescu (Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Romania)15. Made in Translation: A National Poetics for the Transnational WorldMihaela Ursa (Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj, Romania)BibliographyIndex

Romanian Literature as World Literature is an ambitious enterprise to synthesize some important contemporary pieces of research on world literature while introducing the Romanian literature’s 'worldliness' to an international readership. Instead of reducing the comparative investigations to a search for causal, mechanical and hierarchical types of influence exerted by world literature on Romanian literature, or investigating the latter’s sporadic occurrences on the 'great stage' of literature in the major languages, the volume offers a more complex (and more interesting) way to reveal the multiple types of relationships they keep. ... The geopolitical reading proposed by the Romanian Literature as World Literature has certainly a political dimension, as it overtly criticizes the essentialist concept of the national literature which leads to cultural insularism, chauvinism, and hard-line nationalism. ... [It] is a committed piece of scholarship, which is aware of its performative power, aware of its responsibility to represent the connection of the national and the worldly to avoid the dangers of cultural insularism on the one hand, and of self-colonization on the other.

Will appeal to comparatists and world literature specialists, including those committed to reconsidering the role of presumably “minor”/“marginal” national traditions in the world system of literary production and circulation

Literatures as World Literature welcomes new and creative reading methodologies for engaging with the category of world literature. The series acknowledges that the world as object of study has been defined in recent decades by a set of overarching environmental concerns, ongoing geo-political pressures, and realignments of both hard and soft-power dynamics that together dramatically shift our understanding of world literature as a literary category. With this in mind, the series attends to language, form, medium and theme in relation to literary texts and authors in their world-literary dimensions. The series recognizes that world literature grows out of creative and critical reading practices that empower and deepen our understanding of scholarly and educational approaches to a particular author, genre, art form, or theory in diverse ways. We are interested in approaches that interrogate conceptions of the world within a range of literary considerations including aesthetic, geographical, and historical. It will also be important to discover the further reaches of this field in forms of largely oral storytelling still practiced today – often making use of emerging media platforms – with its roots traceable to pre-modernity. In short, we invite scholars and practitioners who are willing to move outward from their own areas of specialization to engage in critical inquiry that mobilizes the polyphonic, multiperspectival, multimedial term of world literature in order to discover something novel and expansive about their area of study. To submit a proposal, please contact Amy.Martin@bloomsbury.com or the series editors: Thomas O. Beebee (tob@psu.edu) or Sofia Ahlberg (sofia.ahlberg@engelska.uu.se). For more information, see www.bloomsbury.com/discover/bloomsbury-academic/authors/submitting-a-book-proposal.