Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă, Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania Across Empires

Abstract

Since its publication, Creolizing the Modern has won both the René Wellek Prize for outstanding books in the discipline of comparative literature and the Barrington Moore Book Award for the best book in comparative historical sociology. Few, if any, books can lay claim to receiving such esteemed accolades across the disciplines of sociology and literary studies and this alone should give the reader a sense of the significance that this intervention represents. A product of collaboration between a literary scholar (Anca Parvulescu) and a sociologist (Manuela Boatcă), the book is based around a close textual reading of Liviu Rebreanu’s 1920 modernist novel, Ion, which centres on struggle of its eponymous character for land ownership in the Transylvanian village of Pripas (now named after Liviu Rebreanu) in the early twentieth century. In Creolizing the Modern, Ion is situated within what the late French literary critic, Pascale Casanova, called the ‘world republic of letters’, a stratified and unequal global network of genre conventions, stylistic orders and linguistic systems. This notion of ‘world literature’ is itself melded with what Immanuel Wallerstein theorized as the capitalist ‘world system’, denoting the historical development of a transnational economy and an accompanying division of labour which divides the world into ‘core’, ‘peripheral’ and ‘semi-peripheral’ regions. Ion takes on a double significance in this meeting of world literature and world system. On the one hand, Ion is a modernist novel set in a rural part of a semi-peripheral region, written in the peripheralized language of Romanian and published within a marginal system of national literary institutions. This, resultantly, means that the novel has remained ‘virtually non-existent for global audiences’ (p. 12), a fact reflected in the difficulty of obtaining an English translation today (two versions exist, both produced in the 1960s and mostly held in university libraries having been acquired during the area studies heyday of the Cold War). On the other hand, Ion itself thematizes the formation of the capitalist world system and its attendant regimes of class, gender, ethnic and religious hierarchy. Over the course of Creolizing the Modern, various characters and passages from Ion are evoked to refract and connect themes such as the 1194158 ISS0010.1177/02685809231194158International SociologyReview: Historical Sociology review-article2023