Rebreanu, creatorul reprezentării literare mic-burgheze a țărănimii

Abstract

Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă’s Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania Across Empires provides a restructured reading grille for the canonical novel Ion by modernist-realist Romanian writer Liviu Rebreanu. Overall, the inter-imperial theoretical frame and method put forth by Parvulescu and Boatcă is fit to the task of decoding relevant aspects of the social representations of the peasantry in late Habsburg Transylvania. However, there are good reasons to suggest that “peripheral realism” would have been a more effective analytical tool. While some of the claims of the book have been discussed by literary critics at the time of publication of the novel, a re-reading of the novel in inter-imperial context lends those claims the comparative dimension that was conspicuously absent in the literary analysis of the novel following its publication.