Combining the instruments of quantitative analysis with those of genre theory, the present article studies the ratio, characteristics, and tendencies underpinning the most important subgenres of the Romanian novel between 1901 and 1932. Among these subgenres, we lay special emphasis on those of popular fiction, on the social, historical, sentimental, psychological, and philosophical novel, as well as on the so-called “event novel”. The conclusions of our inquiry illustrate the ever-growing divide between artistic literature and popular fiction, the recasting of the Romanian novelistic subgenres during the early 20th century, and the gradual relocation of the novelists’ focus from the unmediated depiction of events towards the world and the individual self.

The Geography of the Romanian Novel (1901-1932): Spaces from Abroad This article charts the main cities mentioned in the Romanian novel published between 1901 and 1932 based on the corpus of novels created by the research project The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel 1901-1932 (around 370 digitized novels). The main discoveries that our distant reading of the geography in these novels revealed are that the planet is covered in the Romanian novel during the period in genre fiction (that has mentions of cities from Africa, Asia and South America), not in modernist highbrow literature, and that the dominance of Paris and Rome as spaces where the action takes place is atomized during this period by smaller cities in France and Italy. The article also describes the relation between social mobility and geographical coverage in the epoch. Keywords: Romanian literature, distant reading, geocriticism, literary geography, planetarity.

The present article follows the relationship of the Romanian novelistic output between 1901 and 1932 with time and temporal distribution. Its emphasis falls on the degree of correlation between the time of publication and the time during which the events unfold for each corresponding novel, expressed through a variable coined “distance”. By making use of this variable, the temporal distribution of the novelistic corpus in the article clearly shows that the novelists’ focus gradually shifts towards contemporary events; while during the period between 1900 up until the outbreak of World War One, novelists were inclined to place the events of their works in the past, the War seems to have triggered an acute preoccupation with the immediate present. Lastly, the text touches upon two distinct subgenres of the novel, arisen out of their relationship to time, namely the historical novel and the so-called ‘contemporary novel’.

The study of dramatic plays has long relied on qualitative methods to analyze character interactions, making little assumption about the structural patterns of communication involved. Our approach bridges NLP and literary studies, enabling scalable, data-driven analysis of interaction patterns and power structures in drama. We propose a novel method to supplement addressee identification in tragedies using Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike conventional Social Network Analysis (SNA) approaches, which often diminish dialogue dynamics by relying on co-occurrence or adjacency heuristics, our LLM-based method accurately records directed speech acts, joint addresses, and listener interactions. In a preliminary evaluation of an annotated multilingual dataset of 14 scenes from nine plays in four languages, our top-performing LLM (i.e., Llama3.3-70B) achieved an F1-score of $88.75\%$ (P = $94.81\%$, R = $84.72\%$), an exact match of 77.31%, and an 86.97% partial match with human annotations, where partial match indicates any overlap between predicted and annotated receiver lists. Through automatic extraction of speaker–addressee relations, our method provides preliminary evidence for the potential scalability of SNA for literary analyses, as well as insights into power relations, influence, and isolation of characters in tragedies, which we further visualize by rendering social network graphs.

The present article addresses the Romanian novelistic production between 1901 and 1932 in the attempt of identifying a series of patterns regarding the protagonists’ social mobility. Starting with the most mentioned destinations throughout the novels, I analyse how and why the different social classes travel and try to determine the landmarks between which they dispute their physical presence, on the one hand, and their aspirations, on the other. On this basis, the second part of the article conducts a quantitative analysis of the major means of transport in the period – the train, the tramway, the coach/carriage, the automobile, the aeroplane, the ship, and the waggon – and attempts to pinpoint what they convey about the social mobility of the characters that use them.

The present article addresses Mihai Iovănel’s recently published History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 while pursuing a series of similarities with other contributions to postcommunist national literatures in the Central and Eastern European cultural space, on the one hand, and with previous ways of understanding the concept of literary history, on the other. The article argues that Iovănel’s History is one of the first to assess the importance of the social in the production, study, and national, as well as transnational dissemination of Romanian literature, an emphasis without which the study of literary phenomena risks falling into the blindness of aesthetic autonomy, whose shortcomings are well documented in the book. Lastly, I will argue that Iovănel unwillingly describes several of the most notable shifts in the “regimes of relevance” (Galin Tihanov) that literature has undergone from the communist period to contemporary times.