Thesis title: Indagini sul romanzo romeno del periodo comunista (1948-1980)
The work is dedicated to the study of the Romanian novel of the communist period, more precisely to the texts belonging to the genre of the novel published between 1948 and 1980. The perspective adopted is multiple and structured on several levels, in a progressive approach to the subject of the novel. The first chapter is a historica and cultural introduction: the first part presents the importance of literature (and, more specifically, of the book) within the political, social and cultural system of communism, while the second part defines some of the issues arising from its reception in the post-communist period. The second chapter is an overview of the criticism of novels from the communist period, divided into three periods: Communism, Post-Communism and the 2000s to the present.
In the third chapter, based on the data available in the Chronological Dictionary of the Romanian Novel, the tools of quantitative analysis are used for a general survey of the Romanian novelistic landscape: the first section looks at novelistic production and its distribution within the publishing space, while the second section looks more specifically at the development of the genres and subgenres of the novel in the period 1948-1980, with the aim of providing an overview of its main themes and forms. The fourth chapter, on the other hand, focuses on the paratexts and titles of some of the novels of the period, understood as a threshold that relates text and context. Using other data from the Dictionary, the first section is devoted to the phenomenon of title changes, both between first and subsequent publications and before publication. From the corpus thus assembled, a few illustrative cases are selected for analysis. In a second section, we focus more specifically on the relationship between paratexts and text in fourteen works representative of the period under study. Finally, the fifth chapter concentrates the analysis on a single work, Constantin Țoiu’s Galeria cu viță sălbatică, in whose critical reading we summarise the network of influences and interpretations to which the novel of the period was subjected.